Let Me Tell You about My Grandpa: a Content Analysis of User Annotations to Online Archival Collections by Jessica Sedgwick, Archivist for Women in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

(I’ve just been informed, as well, that this presentation was actually given at SAA last year)…

The research presented investigates how users interact with digital archives when they are given the facility to comment. The results of her analysis are interesting. While I’ve observed the same things, I’ve never thought about quantifying it like this. I think it’s also interesting that the site with the sparsest metadata had the highest number of comments, but the site with the most metadata had the highest proportion of corrections.

Anyway, just for your reading pleasure…

While many in the profession are understandably skeptical, there’s no doubt that hobbyists are increasingly doing real, important work in making archival resources more available.

I can speak from my experience with the Hugh Morton collection and blog that there is valuable knowledge out there to be tapped, and that it doesn’t always take a “crowd” to make a significant contribution (take, for example, our prolific blog commenter who was successfully converted into an official volunteer, and who now not only comments on posts but also writes them). We also had a fun in-person crowdsourcing event that resulted in oodles of usable identifications.

I can also speak, however, to the difficult and time-consuming nature of wrangling the metadata that comes from public sources. Usually it’s a relatively simple matter to verify an ID, but not always — incorporating such info into “official” metadata could be a full-time job.

What do you think? Will archives of the future be hiring “Metadata Outreach Specialists”? Maybe those of you who accept comments on your digital collections can reflect on how it’s gone so far?