Adler Planetarium

The "Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing" project, a research partnership between Adler Planetarium's Library and researchers at Oxford University, will greatly expand the capacity for libraries and archives across the country to use crowdsourcing techniques to engage with audiences and improve access to digital collections through the Zooniverse. The Zooniverse, an international crowdsourcing organization with 1.4 million volunteers, is poised to serve as a transformative element in the future of library and archive engagement efforts and as a core component of the national digital platform. Through this effort, the team will develop a series of library/archive Zooniverse projects that explore improvements to full text and audio transcription and image annotation crowdsourcing tools and research differences between transcribing in isolation versus with knowledge of others' transcription. Lessons learned from these projects will be incorporated into the Project Builder, which enables anyone to build a crowdsourcing project for free.