Bay Area history exhibit aided by crowdsourcing

source: ChimpLearnGood (Peter Durand), http://www.flickr.com/photos/alphachimpstudio/5021655853/sizes/l/in/photostream/

via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

We’ve recently talked about crowdsourcing as a means of fund-raising, Kickstarter -- Need a genealogy project funded? This might be the way to go!, and digitizing, Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration -- Really Neat Genealogy Applications.  It has also been used to identify non-labeled photographs, Library of Congress uses Flickr to crowdsource tagging and organizing its photo archive.  Well, how about using it to make a display even better and/or a collection even richer?  Read how the California Historical Society is doing just this in it’s new experimental exhibit of San Francisco Bay history.

I find this incredibly exciting.  In the past, for example, if you had a photograph and no negative and wanted to share a copy with family or an institution, you might go to a local photography store (and then later a copy shop), get a “color” copy of that photo, find a sturdy envelope, write up a note about why you are sending a copy of this photo, put the note and copy in an envelope, go to the post office to mail it, and hope that you receive some acknowledgement.

Now, you scan the image, attach it to an e-mail and voila, you have now “shared” your invaluable photo with a much larger and very appreciative audience!

What other uses might there be for crowdsourcing in the context of genealogy and family history research?

Have you been involved in a project where crowdsourcing was used successfully to make the project happen?  make it better?

Editor’s Note: While researching this topic a bit, I came across this neat article about continuing efforts to create crowdsourcing tools that can be used by libraries and archives, The Metadata Games Crowdsourcing Toolset for Libraries & Archives: An Interview with Mary Flanagan (The Signal: Digital Preservation blog of the Library of Congress)

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