Page 293 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015293who had been underestimated throughout his- tory and were reinstated in this exhibition. The community was therefore invited to contribute by sharing photographs on the museum’s Flickr profile.How We Are: Photographing Britain can be considered one of the first examples of crowd- sourcing through the digital environment in a museum.Since then, collaborative initiatives based on the digital environment have multiplied owing to the social, communicative and research benefits they provide.In 2014 the National Archives of the United Kingdom, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museums and the Zooniverse online project, launched an initiative that called for the involvement of the community. It consisted in digitising the diaries of British soldiers in the First World War and putting them online to be viewed freely. These diaries reveal tactics, feel- ings, opinions and a huge variety of documents such as maps, drawings, reports and personal writings, etc.The initiative will be continued and is intended to extend to more than a million pages laden with useful information of great historic value, which is already being put online, classifiedby date, unit and operation. The idea is to progressively fine-tune this initial classification with the help of citizens. The initiative called Be Part of History201 will use collective collaboration to expand on the significant data containedin these documents, which are classified bibli- ographically into different categories.This project uses web technology to involve citizens in studying and labelling the diaries, offering them a useful and comfortable wayof working on the documents digitally. Italso provides an online tutorial, a forum for discussion and an expert who will answer users’ queries virtually.Since 2011 the Amsterdam Museum has developed several web experiments based on storytelling in which the community and the museum collect and tell stories jointly. One of them is Geheugen Van Oost,202 which was well received and successful. Volunteers were enlisted to collect and submit stories to the website. The community grew rapidly, as did the number of volunteers willing to contribute.The development of websites based on storytell- ing is a learning process. This became evident in the site designed for the Buurtwinkels exhibition. The community got off to a slow start and the museum had to make an effort to establish fluent communications to encourage participa- tion and give users time to familiarise themselves with the site.The museum attempted to encourage participa- tion, however small, with a Facebook comment or “fav” on Twitter. This attitude is the keyto the success of its online initiatives built on participation and co-creation.What’s on the menu203 is a project launched in 2011 by New York Public Library in which the online community was urged to transcribe the information contained in its collection of menus, which features more than 45,000 exam- ples from the nineteenth century to the present5. Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and crowdcurating