What new or useful technologies have you learned about in 2011?

How do you use social media, if at all, to promote your online collections?

How does your institution curate their digital library/archive online? Is it static? Interactive? A mix?

What does “digital libraries/archives” mean to you?

How did one institution attract 50,000-plus volunteers to help with an archiving project?

The National Library of Finland is in the process of digitizing its archives so that they are fully searchable on the Internet. Scanning the centuries-old newspapers, journals, and documents isn’t so much the problem as is accurately transcribing the text. OCR (Optical Character Reading) software can only do so much. Standard fonts are easy enough for a computer to identify, but aging print in fancy scripts are more difficult. Obscure language, proper names, and decaying paper also interfere with OCR’s text recognition. In order for the materials to be accurately digitized, every document must then be double-checked by human eyes.

To help with the process, The National Library of Finland teamed up with Finnish technology company Microtask to come up with an innovative solution: make a game of it. Granted, it’s hard to imagine how anything like checking manuscript text against a computer’s digital interpretation could really be fun. But Microtask saw things differently—instead of pages of repetitive work, they broke down each individual word-check into what they (appropriately) call microtasks.

Taking each microtask as a tiny action to perform, two online flash games were created.

In Mole Bridge is a fast-paced typing challenge. An image of a digitized word from the original manuscript appears at the top of the screen. The player must type the word, as best he or she can read it, as quickly as possible. The typed word helps build a “bridge” that ensures the safety of some adorably cute, but evidently suicidal moles, who tirelessly try to cross the void. The quicker the words are entered, the more moles make it to safety. Words that are indecipherable—or too difficult to type (American keyboards lack the å, ö, and ä symbols common in Finnish) — can be skipped without penalty.

In Mole Hunt, cute critters hold up signs with individual manuscript words and the computer’s interpretation of each word below. Players identify whether or not the computer’s recognition of the word is accurate.

In terms of fun, the games are more on par with Mavis Beacon than Super Mario. But like many other online distractions, there’s something strangely addicting about them. Knowing that the games actually contribute to a worthwhile cause —preserving the cultural heritage of Finland — is evidently enough to keep people playing. Since the Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt were launched in February, they’ve logged over 50,000 players, hailing mostly from Finland, the UK, and the US. At last count, the grand total of work contributed to these games is over 3,500 hours, with 4.5 million microtasks achieved.

The real brilliance of these games is that not only do they get the work done, they get it done right. With thousands of people playing, gamers effectively cross-check one another’s work. The software developers at Microtask have even created a defense against the few people who might have malicious intent (apparently, even Finnish libraries occasionally encounter mean-spirited Internet trolls).

When the game starts, the computer shows words that have already been accurately identified. It can then determine if someone is making deliberate mistakes or is just too poor of a typist to benefit the project, and then disregards every further answer submitted by the player. Microtask reported that volunteers’ transcriptions were 99% accurate.

While the games delegate hours of work to the hands of others, they are in no way a substitute for trained professionals. No matter how many microtasks are achieved, the games only cover a fragment of the digitization process. Archivists, librarians, and other specialists are still necessary to develop and implement every step of digitization projects. Accurately digitizing a nation’s archives is an enormous task. For starters, it would require:

• Different classification schemes for different types of materials
• Categorization by subject matter
• Indexing every document
• Entering metadata on every file
• Secure storage space with prevention against digital decay
• A user-friendly interface that allows for effective browsing and searching

And that’s in addition to a plethora of other issues as well. How well does centuries-old newsprint fare in a scanner? What do you do with materials still under copyright? How do you anticipate the needs of both serious researchers and more casual users, such as genealogists?

Implementing gaming systems is not a quick solution to digitization projects, but many institutions could benefit from The Finland National Library‘s model. Introducing similar programs would not only help the workload behind large-scale digitization projects, it would (perhaps most importantly) establish a connection between the public and their libraries. It would raise awareness to libraries’ missions and likely cause more people to support such institutions. Preserving cultural heritage should not just be the work of archivists, and now, it doesn’t have to be.

Play Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt at http://www.digitalkoot.fi/en

Further reading:
Gamification time: What if everything were just a game?
The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free)
Digitalkoot e-programme breaks 25,000 participant mark

Please note that the images are used with permission from Microtask. Several attempts were made to receive written permission from the National Library of Finland, but there was no response. We assume that in the interest of education, this is fair use.

What are your golden rules of digital preservation?

A few weeks ago I was honored to attend the National Digital Stewardship Alliance meeting. The NDSA was planned by the Library of Congress as part of their NDIIP project.  There were more people there than I expected and it was a humbling experience to hear some of the brightest and most creative brains in Digital Preservation speak.

The high volume of information was overwhelming.  I spent more than six hours at the end of the conference compiling a PowerPoint of the important research highlights.   A small sample of this information is included below.

There were many wonderful presentations giving case studies on how institutions used their own creativity to try and enhance the longevity or migratability (new word?) of their digital files.  The amazing work often was done on a shoestring which though unfortunate, also forced a certain level of imagination and invention.

A few examples are:

Jack Brighton, of campus radio station WILL, gave a wonderful presentation on what a small station is doing to make their civil rights collection more accessible.

Kickstarter.com did a great presentation on how they are helping arts projects get funded and we hope that as they branch into community work that digital preservation might fit into that.

The UK Web Archiving project covered some of the complexities and true effort that it takes to try and tackle capturing the online history of its nation.   http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

- As of December 2010 – 9 million sites with .uk, probably 1M more

- 10,027 websites archived

- Need skills in Linux, Java, Hadoop, and SOL

5 keys processes to web archiving

- Selection

- Harvesting

- Storage

- Preservation

- Access

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ngram/

So after taking in all this good information, what is it that I have left the conference with?

People just like us are doing some wonderful problem solving out there.  There is some potential being unlocked, but there is so much to do.

As I see it the Action Items are:

1)    Greater broadcasting of the successful case studies for migration and open solutions.

2)    Training classes in how to boil this down for each type of format/issue.  The NDSA Outreach group held a session called “Digital Preservation in a Box”.  This is the beginning of standardizing the tools that we need.

3)    Overarching education to information and production professionals, as well as, the general public about the dangers of digital fragility and the need for migration (at the least).

I have mentioned to my classes for years that future anthropologists, sociologists and historians will have little to sift through from the late 20^th century.

Some of it is being worked on by archivists now but much is gone.  Let’s keep making progress so that the future of our current history is not lost, like the way of silent films.

More informational tidbits from NDSA:

Other Great Projects

—       ThatCamp.org

—       http://www.scola.org/scola/sampledigitalarchive.aspx

NYPL Labs

—     http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=nypl+map+rectifier&sourceid=Mozilla-search

—     http://menus.nypl.org/

Archiving Facebook

Grad student designed Firefox add-on for individual archiving of Fb.

www.Bit.ly/archivefb

Preserving Virtual Worlds

—      www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097

Cool Tools

—  http://www.google.com/landing/historypin/

—  http://blogs.yu.edu/cpa/2011/02/23/open-source-video-platforms-kaltura-vs-entermedia/

Great Quotes

—    JackBrighton”(DAM) is more like an appliance than an Ecosystem.”

—    Michael Nelson “We need to raise the level of user expectations.”

—    Michael Nelson “In all good computer science functions you solve the problem through indirection.”

—    Wheatley and Frieze “The world does not change one person at a time.  It changes as networks of relationships form among people        who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.”

—    Tim O’Reilly(?) “Teach preservation as a mindset.  Bake this into the tools.”

New Phrases

—    Social Curation

—    Metadata Ecologists

What is your understanding of the digital preservation process?

What was the best piece of research that you have seen come out professionally?

Do you have digital files that your institution can not open/play?