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Collaborative indexing: when cultural institutions call on the public to annotate works, documents and archives

Published on 03 September 2018
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

The archivist, alone in his ivory tower, who inventories old documents in order to make them available to a handful of scholars, is a cliché that no longer holds true. First, because the inflation of documentary production has made archivists responsible for much larger volumes and the leaders of more numerous teams than in the past; second, because consulting archives is a popular cultural practice.(Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet, Archives nationales, and Édouard Bouyé, archives départementales de la Côte-d'Or)
 

The campaign to index the records of the soldiers of World War I and its success (1.4 million indexed records) have given visibility to the various forms of "cultural crowdsourcing" deployed by museums, archives and libraries.

Many institutions now offer the public the opportunity to annotate, correct or complete digitized resources, and to take part, through their contributions, in the enhancement of collections as well as in the knowledge of heritage.

These practices of "crowd sourcing" can take various forms: nominative survey of genealogical sources, indexing of files, identification of photographs, correction of errors in digitized documents ...

1.4 million records of soldiers who died for France indexed

On the occasion of the centenary of the First World War, the Directorate of Heritage, Memory and Archives (DPMA) of the Ministry of the Armed Forces had set up in 2013 a platform, Mémoire des Hommes, which allowed Internet users to enrich the data relating to the 1.4 million soldiers who died for France from the information present on their online digitized death records. In addition to the surname, first name, date of birth, department or country of birth, it was necessary to transcribe the rank and unit at the time of death, the recruitment, the place of birth, the date and place of death, etc.

As of April 2018, all 1,422,977 records had been indexed, seven months ahead of the November 11, 2018 deadline. 2506 annotators have participated in the enrichment of this virtual memorial, with ten contributors alone having indexed more than 400,000 records. The Ministry's call for contributions was relayed by the "Adopt a Poilu" initiative (Yvelines departmental archives) and by the " 1 Day 1 Poilu" team.

This transcription now allows specialists and historians to obtain, in just a few clicks, a more detailed knowledge of the conflict by means of cross-referenced research and to know, for example, how many individuals died on the same day or during the same battle. We know that the deadliest day of the conflict was not, as historians have long believed, August 22, 1914 (21,072 dead) but September 25, 1915 (23,567 dead), the Champagne and Artois offensives.

The genealogy website, Généanet, had set up a collaborative indexing project related to cemeteries and war memorials through the project Save our graves. For this project, Internet users are invited to digitize photos of graves or to index them on the site. Nearly one million graves have already been documented.

Collaborative indexing in national and departmental archives

By relying on old participative habits and the potential of digital technology, archives services solicit Internet users to enrich their archival holdings, promote their appropriation and understanding by the public, and develop new services based on the data collected.

A large number of departmental archives now offer collaborative indexing modules that allow those who consult digitized archives (usually parish and civil registers, sometimes censuses and matriculation registers) to annotate them.

Within the framework of the Grand Mémorial program, the archives of several departments are offering citizens the opportunity to index the registers of each of the 8.5 million combatants of the First World War.

The National Archives, for their part, opened a collaborative platform in early 2018 where citizen volunteers can transcribe wills written by Poilus during World War I. The "Testaments de Poilus" project aims to produce an electronic edition of a thousand wills of the Poilus of the First World War. The documents studied come from the notary archives of the Yvelines Departmental Archives.

In order to promote the indexing and analysis work carried out by Internet users and volunteers on the basis of archival collections, the National Archives have opened the blog Archives nationales participatives. Among the projects proposed to Internet users is the indexation of the registers of the Conseil général des ponts et chaussées. The Natnum database of digitized naturalization decrees will gradually be opened to collaborative indexing.

According to Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet (National Archives) and Édouard Bouyé (Departmental Archives of the Côte-d'Or), "the role of the archivist is to make this work on sources possible, to supervise it (more or less, depending on the nature of the projects), The public expects the archivist, who must free himself from the posture of absolute knowledge, to be the guarantor of the reliability of the information produced, even if he does not have the concrete means to systematically validate it a priori.

General interest entrepreneurs" to design tools and lead cultural crowdsourcing projects

The "Entrepreneur.e d'Intérêt Général" program (launched in 2016) is based on the recruitment of talent from outside the administration, hired for 10 months, to solve, through their exceptional digital skills and thanks to data, challenges of general interest, within the ministries.

Bastien Guerry was recruited in 2017 during the first class of the "Entrepreneurs of General Interest" program to set up a web platform for the participatory inventory of the national organ heritage. It is estimated that there are 8000 or 12000 organs in France (including 1500 classified organs). The construction of this collaborative database of organs came up against the multiplicity of sources (a paper inventory, numerous inventories, a myriad of personal sites administered by amateurs and enthusiasts as well as the absence of a data model for organs. Anxious to involve all the members of this community, Bastien Guerry accompanied the implementation of the "organ inventory" platform with file-sharing tools.) Drawing lessons from this project, Bastien Guerry underlines "the "artisanal" and progressive construction of the platform as well as the interest of being in direct and permanent contact with the Inventory's professions and organ specialists for regular adjustments and the continuous contribution of new ideas".

For the second promotion of the "Entrepreneurs of General Interest" program, the Ministry of Culture and the National Furniture Department proposed a challenge: "to facilitate the use of the heritage of the National Furniture by public agents, the art professions and the general public by developing participatory indexing tools . The heritage collections of the Mobilier national and the manufactures represent 100,000 items of museum quality furniture, carpets, tapestries and furnishing fabrics. "Due to the lack of structured metadata, the databases and documentary directories do not interact, search and filtering capabilities remain very limited, and their use remains exclusively reserved for the agents of the Mobilier national. The heritage collections of the Mobilier national, rich in 100,000 items, are currently described in a database that is inaccessible to the public.

The two hired GITs, Ned Baldessin (Web Developer) and Laurie Chapotte (Graphic and Service Designer), will have ten months to:

  • To open the collection to the outside public, to facilitate access and discovery by as many people as possible through a consultation and research interface,
  • Enable National Furniture agents to conduct multi-criteria and multi-format searches of all documentation through a shared indexing system,
  • Open the participatory production of content to enrich and diversify information on heritage through the design of a capture and indexing system.

Collaboration and post-mediation: the BNF in the age of the many

In a very stimulating article, La BNF à l'âge de la multitude, Céline Leclaire, in charge of the mission at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, outlines the features of the library in the 21st century, based on a few principles:
  • Collaboration: "It is important not only to integrate participation into the day-to-day operations of the library, but above all to change the scale of its ability to involve the 'multitude. The Gallica Studio is already deploying "a field of initiatives unrestricted by institutional logic, a playground open to the unexpected and the ephemeral.
  • Post-mediation: both enlargement in terms of the content presented and great diversification of the modes of appropriation proposed. "These modes are placed under the sign of doing, according to the idea that one should no longer propose a ready-made service, which leaves nothing for the user to do ... The key words of post-mediation are the tool, the instructions for use, the documentation, and their contemporary avatar, the GitHub development platform. It is no longer a question of asking "what to find" or even "how to find" but "how to do".
  • Indirection: opening up to the unexpected and the ephemeral, letting go of one's own objectives to make room for those of the Multitude. This "posture of humility" concerns objects, documents, collections, content (which can be diverted and used for the users' own purposes) but also the institution itself.
  • Platform model: "In addition to being malleable and open, a platform is capable of integrating external elements that are not necessarily close to libraries and/or do not go through their channels but allow them, by ricochet, to reach an audience that they cannot otherwise reach.
In support of this ambition, the author cites a series of past and current initiatives and projects at the BNF. Read more...

"Participate / Participate! Heritage and participatory devices"

The Department of Research Steering and Scientific Policy (DPRPS) of the Ministry of Culture organized on October 5 and 6, 2017, at the INHA (Paris) professional days devoted to participatory devices in the field of Heritage.

"At a time when the use of digital technology is constantly developing, participatory projects are multiplying, particularly in the cultural and heritage field. However, for heritage in particular, the participation of the public did not appear only with the rise of digital tools but has always been one of the challenges of cultural democratization. Today's collaborative practices pursue the same objectives with new tools. They contribute to the identification, enrichment, knowledge and appropriation of cultural heritage.

Session 1 - Participation in the field of heritage: a long history

  • Antiquarian citizens: discourses and forms of involvement of the civic body in the inventory and safeguarding of historical monuments, from the Revolution to the dawn of the July Monarchy" Mission Patrimoine ", quand les bénévoles s'en mêlentParticipation at the origin of territorial museums
  • The departmental pre-inventory committees: an association of active forces in the territory
  • The pioneering role of volunteer associations in the work of archives: between users and producers of data
  • Get involved! Present imperative and other contemporary conjugations of heritage
  • Participative, collaborative, crowdsourcing: what are the stakes for heritage?
Session 2 - Modes and modalities of participation

The Great Collection: when personal memories enrich the community heritage The research-collection "History and Memories of AIDS" at the MNATP (MuCEM

  • The Visitors' Room: a participatory device
  • Enriching the Lists: the public, its heritage and its protection in England
  • Collaborative Enrichment of Heritage DataCollaborative Indexing and Transcription in the Networked World of Archives Today: Successes and Future Challenges
  • The herbonauts
  • Historical and collaborative dictionaries at the heart of the service project
ROUND TABLE
  • The participatory heritage inventory, a commitment affirmed in Brittany
  • "Histoire de bahut": a successful participatory inventory project on the heritage of high schools
  • Participatory inventory of intangible cultural heritage in West Central Brittany: from principle to implementation
  • What participatory tools for the new field of scientific and technical heritage?
These professional days were an opportunity to assess the operations carried out by the heritage institutions and the various actors involved, to analyze the results in order to better consider the perspectives opened by these new tools.

Références :

Sources

Collaborative indexing: when cultural institutions call on the public to annotate works, documents and archives

The archivist, alone in his ivory tower, who inventories old documents in order to make them available to a handful of scholars, is a cliché that no longer holds true. First, because the inflation of documentary production has made archivists responsible for much larger volumes and the leaders of more numerous teams than in the past; second, because consulting archives is a popular cultural practice.(Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet, Archives nationales, and Édouard Bouyé, archives départementales de la Côte-d'Or)
 

The campaign to index the records of the soldiers of World War I and its success (1.4 million indexed records) have given visibility to the various forms of "cultural crowdsourcing" deployed by museums, archives and libraries.

Many institutions now offer the public the opportunity to annotate, correct or complete digitized resources, and to take part, through their contributions, in the enhancement of collections as well as in the knowledge of heritage.

These practices of "crowd sourcing" can take various forms: nominative survey of genealogical sources, indexing of files, identification of photographs, correction of errors in digitized documents ...

1.4 million records of soldiers who died for France indexed

On the occasion of the centenary of the First World War, the Directorate of Heritage, Memory and Archives (DPMA) of the Ministry of the Armed Forces had set up in 2013 a platform, Mémoire des Hommes, which allowed Internet users to enrich the data relating to the 1.4 million soldiers who died for France from the information present on their online digitized death records. In addition to the surname, first name, date of birth, department or country of birth, it was necessary to transcribe the rank and unit at the time of death, the recruitment, the place of birth, the date and place of death, etc.

As of April 2018, all 1,422,977 records had been indexed, seven months ahead of the November 11, 2018 deadline. 2506 annotators have participated in the enrichment of this virtual memorial, with ten contributors alone having indexed more than 400,000 records. The Ministry's call for contributions was relayed by the "Adopt a Poilu" initiative (Yvelines departmental archives) and by the " 1 Day 1 Poilu" team.

This transcription now allows specialists and historians to obtain, in just a few clicks, a more detailed knowledge of the conflict by means of cross-referenced research and to know, for example, how many individuals died on the same day or during the same battle. We know that the deadliest day of the conflict was not, as historians have long believed, August 22, 1914 (21,072 dead) but September 25, 1915 (23,567 dead), the Champagne and Artois offensives.

The genealogy website, Généanet, had set up a collaborative indexing project related to cemeteries and war memorials through the project Save our graves. For this project, Internet users are invited to digitize photos of graves or to index them on the site. Nearly one million graves have already been documented.

Collaborative indexing in national and departmental archives

By relying on old participative habits and the potential of digital technology, archives services solicit Internet users to enrich their archival holdings, promote their appropriation and understanding by the public, and develop new services based on the data collected.

A large number of departmental archives now offer collaborative indexing modules that allow those who consult digitized archives (usually parish and civil registers, sometimes censuses and matriculation registers) to annotate them.

Within the framework of the Grand Mémorial program, the archives of several departments are offering citizens the opportunity to index the registers of each of the 8.5 million combatants of the First World War.

The National Archives, for their part, opened a collaborative platform in early 2018 where citizen volunteers can transcribe wills written by Poilus during World War I. The "Testaments de Poilus" project aims to produce an electronic edition of a thousand wills of the Poilus of the First World War. The documents studied come from the notary archives of the Yvelines Departmental Archives.

In order to promote the indexing and analysis work carried out by Internet users and volunteers on the basis of archival collections, the National Archives have opened the blog Archives nationales participatives. Among the projects proposed to Internet users is the indexation of the registers of the Conseil général des ponts et chaussées. The Natnum database of digitized naturalization decrees will gradually be opened to collaborative indexing.

According to Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet (National Archives) and Édouard Bouyé (Departmental Archives of the Côte-d'Or), "the role of the archivist is to make this work on sources possible, to supervise it (more or less, depending on the nature of the projects), The public expects the archivist, who must free himself from the posture of absolute knowledge, to be the guarantor of the reliability of the information produced, even if he does not have the concrete means to systematically validate it a priori.

General interest entrepreneurs" to design tools and lead cultural crowdsourcing projects

The "Entrepreneur.e d'Intérêt Général" program (launched in 2016) is based on the recruitment of talent from outside the administration, hired for 10 months, to solve, through their exceptional digital skills and thanks to data, challenges of general interest, within the ministries.

Bastien Guerry was recruited in 2017 during the first class of the "Entrepreneurs of General Interest" program to set up a web platform for the participatory inventory of the national organ heritage. It is estimated that there are 8000 or 12000 organs in France (including 1500 classified organs). The construction of this collaborative database of organs came up against the multiplicity of sources (a paper inventory, numerous inventories, a myriad of personal sites administered by amateurs and enthusiasts as well as the absence of a data model for organs. Anxious to involve all the members of this community, Bastien Guerry accompanied the implementation of the "organ inventory" platform with file-sharing tools.) Drawing lessons from this project, Bastien Guerry underlines "the "artisanal" and progressive construction of the platform as well as the interest of being in direct and permanent contact with the Inventory's professions and organ specialists for regular adjustments and the continuous contribution of new ideas".

For the second promotion of the "Entrepreneurs of General Interest" program, the Ministry of Culture and the National Furniture Department proposed a challenge: "to facilitate the use of the heritage of the National Furniture by public agents, the art professions and the general public by developing participatory indexing tools . The heritage collections of the Mobilier national and the manufactures represent 100,000 items of museum quality furniture, carpets, tapestries and furnishing fabrics. "Due to the lack of structured metadata, the databases and documentary directories do not interact, search and filtering capabilities remain very limited, and their use remains exclusively reserved for the agents of the Mobilier national. The heritage collections of the Mobilier national, rich in 100,000 items, are currently described in a database that is inaccessible to the public.

The two hired GITs, Ned Baldessin (Web Developer) and Laurie Chapotte (Graphic and Service Designer), will have ten months to:

  • To open the collection to the outside public, to facilitate access and discovery by as many people as possible through a consultation and research interface,
  • Enable National Furniture agents to conduct multi-criteria and multi-format searches of all documentation through a shared indexing system,
  • Open the participatory production of content to enrich and diversify information on heritage through the design of a capture and indexing system.

Collaboration and post-mediation: the BNF in the age of the many

In a very stimulating article, La BNF à l'âge de la multitude, Céline Leclaire, in charge of the mission at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, outlines the features of the library in the 21st century, based on a few principles:
  • Collaboration: "It is important not only to integrate participation into the day-to-day operations of the library, but above all to change the scale of its ability to involve the 'multitude. The Gallica Studio is already deploying "a field of initiatives unrestricted by institutional logic, a playground open to the unexpected and the ephemeral.
  • Post-mediation: both enlargement in terms of the content presented and great diversification of the modes of appropriation proposed. "These modes are placed under the sign of doing, according to the idea that one should no longer propose a ready-made service, which leaves nothing for the user to do ... The key words of post-mediation are the tool, the instructions for use, the documentation, and their contemporary avatar, the GitHub development platform. It is no longer a question of asking "what to find" or even "how to find" but "how to do".
  • Indirection: opening up to the unexpected and the ephemeral, letting go of one's own objectives to make room for those of the Multitude. This "posture of humility" concerns objects, documents, collections, content (which can be diverted and used for the users' own purposes) but also the institution itself.
  • Platform model: "In addition to being malleable and open, a platform is capable of integrating external elements that are not necessarily close to libraries and/or do not go through their channels but allow them, by ricochet, to reach an audience that they cannot otherwise reach.
In support of this ambition, the author cites a series of past and current initiatives and projects at the BNF. Read more...

"Participate / Participate! Heritage and participatory devices"

The Department of Research Steering and Scientific Policy (DPRPS) of the Ministry of Culture organized on October 5 and 6, 2017, at the INHA (Paris) professional days devoted to participatory devices in the field of Heritage.

"At a time when the use of digital technology is constantly developing, participatory projects are multiplying, particularly in the cultural and heritage field. However, for heritage in particular, the participation of the public did not appear only with the rise of digital tools but has always been one of the challenges of cultural democratization. Today's collaborative practices pursue the same objectives with new tools. They contribute to the identification, enrichment, knowledge and appropriation of cultural heritage.

Session 1 - Participation in the field of heritage: a long history

  • Antiquarian citizens: discourses and forms of involvement of the civic body in the inventory and safeguarding of historical monuments, from the Revolution to the dawn of the July Monarchy" Mission Patrimoine ", quand les bénévoles s'en mêlentParticipation at the origin of territorial museums
  • The departmental pre-inventory committees: an association of active forces in the territory
  • The pioneering role of volunteer associations in the work of archives: between users and producers of data
  • Get involved! Present imperative and other contemporary conjugations of heritage
  • Participative, collaborative, crowdsourcing: what are the stakes for heritage?
Session 2 - Modes and modalities of participation

The Great Collection: when personal memories enrich the community heritage The research-collection "History and Memories of AIDS" at the MNATP (MuCEM

  • The Visitors' Room: a participatory device
  • Enriching the Lists: the public, its heritage and its protection in England
  • Collaborative Enrichment of Heritage DataCollaborative Indexing and Transcription in the Networked World of Archives Today: Successes and Future Challenges
  • The herbonauts
  • Historical and collaborative dictionaries at the heart of the service project
ROUND TABLE
  • The participatory heritage inventory, a commitment affirmed in Brittany
  • "Histoire de bahut": a successful participatory inventory project on the heritage of high schools
  • Participatory inventory of intangible cultural heritage in West Central Brittany: from principle to implementation
  • What participatory tools for the new field of scientific and technical heritage?
These professional days were an opportunity to assess the operations carried out by the heritage institutions and the various actors involved, to analyze the results in order to better consider the perspectives opened by these new tools.

Références :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
Collaborative indexing: when cultural institutions call on the public to annotate works, documents and archives