Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A History Of Collaboration, A Future In Crowdsourcing: Positive Impacts Of Cooperation On British Librarianship, Sally Ellis

Library Staff Publications and Research

This article looks at the varying definitions and usage of the term ‘crowdsourcing,’ including those that insist the term may only be applied to online activities. An argument is made that, semantics aside, the activities known as crowdsourcing, collaboration, and/or citizen science, were in use long before the current online medium was invented and should be recognized not for the terminology employed but for the mutual benefits reaped. The article addresses the strengths of such activities, including user engagement, the accomplishment of tasks otherwise not possible because of budget cuts, and diversity of viewpoint. In addition, the possible weaknesses of …

Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Alexander, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski

Faculty Publications

Utah Digital Newspaper

What we do

• Create digital images of historic Utah newspapers
• Create searchable text of every page/article
• Make both images and text available on the Internet

Who we are

• Run by J. Willard Marriott Library, Univ. of Utah
• Entirely a “soft money” program
• National leader, especially within the public sector

Getting The Crowd Into Obituaries: How A Unique Partnership Combined The World’S Largest Obituary Index With Utah’S Largest Historic Newspaper Database, Jeremy Myntti, John Herbert, Alan Witkowski, John Alexander

Faculty Publications

The Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) and FamilySearch are joining forces to create an innovative obituary index. UDN contains 282,000 obituaries in its extensive database of historic Utah newspapers. UDN’s headlines are manually keyed (double-keyed and reconciled), and are nearly letter-perfect. However, the article text is created from raw optical character recognition software, which is often less than fully accurate.