Crowdsourcing Help for the Smithsonian’s Collections
The US Herbarium at the Natural History Museum’s Botany Department needs your help in a colossal digitization projection.
There are approximately 5 million plant specimens within its collections, but the labels of most of them cannot be read by computers. This is where you can come in to help make the materials, documents and knowledge more widely available to researchers and members of the public.
Users do not have to commit a minimum amount of hours or specific times when they will be able to get involved. Just go to the Smithsonian’s recently established transcription site, select a project that floats your boat and start transcribing. When you have completed the work, you submit it for review and another volunteer comes in to check it.
You could be working on important specimens collected more than a hundred years ago.
This crowdsousourcing initiative is a pilot project for other large Smithsonian scientific collections, accounting for some 126 million specimens.
It is the brainchild of Jason Shen and Sarah Allen, two Presidential Innovation Fellows working with the Smithsonian Institute to improve its open data initiatives. Last August they launched the Smithsonian Transcription Center as part of a wider effort to digitize all of the Institute’s collections.
Crowdsourcing Benefits
These are deep and useful reservoirs of knowledge, but unless a person is inspecting documents and specimens in person they remain hidden from the public’s gaze.
The crowdsourcing Smithsonian project will undoubtedly uncover many treasures that will be easily available online. And by involving the crowd, it will happen in a much quicker time frame.
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