Reviewing Crowdsourcing and Community Engagement in Museums

Abstract

Over the past two decades, museums have increasingly experimented with digital technologies to connect with broader contemporary culture. This review article investigates the role crowdsourcing can play in transforming museums into more engaged environments, raising visibility and inclusivity, and involving diverse voices and populations in knowledge-creation processes. Its contribution is to provide an overview of the history, definitions and concepts of crowdsourcing, and examples of crowdsourcing policies and practices that have been adopted by museums. Participation in crowdsourcing has been influenced by gender, education, and socio-economic and cultural background. In the past, historical structures and traditions and infrastructural complexities have stood in the way of wider diversity and inclusivity. As museums move increasingly online, the circulation of information outside the museum’s walls is just as important as the specialist knowledge held within. Museums can play a leading role in public communication by reaching those who constitute the ‘crowd’. This paper explores how museums, through strong collaboration and various forms of crowdsourcing, such as citizen science and participatory engagement, can offer more wide-ranging open access for the sharing and democratisation of knowledge.

1. Introduction

Advances in interactive digital technologies, coupled with the open access movement, are enabling increasingly diverse communities to exchange and produce knowledge. These collaborative processes take many forms and are referred to in many different ways by terms such as citizen science, crowd wisdom, mass collaboration, and community engagement. Also pointing to increasingly open approaches to the production and sharing of knowledge are terms such as participatory practices, user-powered systems, user-generated content, collaborative systems, collective intelligence, and peer engagement. In this paper these kinds of open approaches are discussed in terms of their role in transforming historical perceptions of museums.

Taking advantage of this changing dynamic over the past two decades, museums have increasingly experimented with digital technologies, more consciously connecting themselves with popular culture not only to present collections in ways that increase public appreciation and accessibility, but also to democratise content and encourage a sense of public ownership and belonging (Arthur, 2018; Navarrete, 2020). Community access, public engagement, and citizen science are central to the charters of most museums. While the pace of museum adoption of technologies has varied, and in some cases has been slow or uneven due to financial, cultural or other factors, the opportunities provided by new digital technologies are indeed vast and multifaceted. Yet, while museum practices are consciously opening up to innovative participatory approaches, these efforts remain unequally distributed. Disparities in accessibility continue, influenced by factors including gender, class, age, religion, ethnicity, education, and geographic location. Barriers to access are not just due to lack of resources, affordability, and skills, or museum policies, but also to stratified colonial and ethnic frameworks that still underpin histories, heritage, and museology. These have resulted in principles of selection and presentation that limit participation and representation in current museum practices (Albornoz et al., 2018; Chan et al., 2011; Larivière et al., 2015). Further, it has been pointed out that open access policies, having stemmed primarily from the ‘Global North’, have themselves created new categories of exclusion, thus exacerbating colonialist systems of scholarly communication, and further disadvantaging marginalised groups by neglecting their needs and aspirations (Smith & Seward, 2020).

In response, there have been calls for more attention to be given to inclusiveness, participation and negotiation in the roles and the discourse of academics, curators, librarians, IT experts, and community organisations involved in museum crowdsourcing (Fredheim, 2018; Ridge, 2014; Schofield, 2017). Many museums now have digital outreach for diverse audiences through interactive elements including motion-sensing spaces, speech recognition, networked installations, and multitouch tables and surfaces (Arthur, 2018). While digital technologies are creating unprecedented and almost unlimited possibilities to satisfy the demand for a stream of high-quality, audience-specific, tailored digital content, questions remain as to how effectively such innovations are able to overcome traditional barriers and deliver benefits in more open, democratic and inclusive ways. Open communication requires a multi-directional flow of ideas between different groups within the community. Without this, information can be silo-ed around ‘knowledge clubs’ of exclusive academic or scholarly status that impede both direct community input and the increasing opportunities for knowledge exchange through museum collectives (Maryl et al., 2020; Okune et al., 2019).

This paper traces the history, theory, definitions and concepts of crowdsourcing in the museum context while also identifying examples of innovative policies and processes, pioneered by some museums, to utilise forms of participatory engagement such as citizen science. It highlights barriers and opportunities, and identifies research gaps, with the goal of informing policy and practice. In doing so, this study investigates innovative approaches that museums can adopt or have adopted in engaging diverse populations in knowledge exchange by scoping out the uptake of crowdsourcing by museums. It asks the questions: How, in our digital era, can museums build a more open, connected, and equitable environment? Who represents their ‘crowds’ and to what extent can they be engaged? How can crowdsourcing unlock access to data, information, and knowledge to yield positive outcomes for all, regardless of their socio-economic, gender, geographical or cultural backgrounds? And what is the state of crowdsourcing in museum policy? Crowdsourcing has been topical since the term was first coined in the 1990s, yet is an ever changing field. This paper looks in particular at the opportunities that museums (and in some cases the GLAM sector more broadly) now have, including ethical responsibilities, in the current context. As such, it reviews key voices and trends over the past decade, and highlights key issues to provide an up-to-date overview and commentary in this area.

2. History of Crowdsourcing and Its Definitions

For centuries, academics, curators and scientists have collaborated with engaged citizens or ‘gifted amateurs’ in what has become known as ‘citizen science’ (Hedges & Dunn, 2018). Among the most well-known historical examples was the British government’s offer in 1714 of a monetary prize to anyone who could come up with a means of measuring a ship’s longitudinal position (Rees, 2014). In another example, in the 1880s the Oxford English Dictionary conducted a call-out to the public to supply lexicographers with the spelling, definitions and meanings of rare words in magazines, journals, books, letters, and newspapers (Liu, 2016). Similar approaches have been used to facilitate public participation, further research outcomes, and gain information associated with plants, animals, birdlife, fossils, planets and stars (Hecker et al., 2018). This has also been the underlying approach of museums and related memory institutions to acquiring, processing and preserving new information and knowledge for their collections.

Levels of citizen participation and engagement in crowdsourcing vary significantly from micro-engagement, or ‘degrees of tokenism’, with untrained community volunteers providing occasional information or assistance for the collection of data, to ‘degrees of citizen power’ involving ongoing, delegated control by citizens but with expertise being central to the process (Arnstein, 1969). In the mid-1990s the term ‘citizen science’ was first defined as a necessary process to open up academic science to the public by both responding to their concerns and needs and engaging them in the production of reliable knowledge (Irwin, 1995). Yet it was not until the Internet became readily available to the public that easy and instant sharing and exchange of content and ideas was enabled, which led to the coining of the term ‘crowdsourcing’ by Jeff Howe, editor of Wired, in 2006 (Howe, 2006). Howe described how businesses could use the Internet not only for ‘outsourcing’ their work but also for ‘crowdsourcing’ it. Crowdsourcing was viewed as the ‘wisdom of crowds’, where areas of knowledge could be matched with people who have relevant interests and experience. Online spaces provide a venue for individuals to be more comfortable and open to sharing data without the impediments of geographical, physical, cultural, social or time barriers, and without having to submit to direct personal scrutiny or judgement.

Crowdsourcing takes advantage of the networked digital environment by reaching out to people beyond the immediate project team or employees and inviting them to participate in a task through, for example, an open call for knowledge and information (Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012). It is a way of leveraging a vast and diverse set of people to generate and produce ideas, and solve problems, with interactions and contributions facilitated through specialised software tools (Hirth et al., 2017). This approach has given rise to myriad platforms such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk, Galaxy Zoo, and Zooniverse, which host a multitude of interactive projects that allow volunteers to perform tasks remotely online. In many cases the facilitating of virtual crowds brings financial and business benefits, enabling organisations to reduce costs, achieve economies of scale, and increase the pooling and scope of ideas for the development of innovative projects (Brabham, 2008; Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012). Most crowdsourcing platforms have therefore tended to focus on providing systems to assist and support institutions to manage the crowdsourcing workforce, and create and process microtasks, rather than focusing on the virtual crowd and their needs (Hirth et al., 2017).

Unlike business-oriented crowdsourcing, academic crowdsourcing involves a more complex participatory activity for the co-creation of knowledge (Hedges & Dunn, 2018; Ridge, 2014). Accordingly, it has been aligned with the conceptual frameworks of open access, open scholarship, and open collaboration. It has been defined as a type of online participatory activity that can be either partially or wholly conducted by non-academic volunteers or ‘engaged citizens’ (Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012). Like citizen science, academic crowdsourcing can either delegate tasks to engaged citizens for collection, processing and digitalisation of data, or alternatively can seek to democratise knowledge through engaging non-academic participants in the entire process of conceptualising, defining and setting up the research agenda, process and outcome (Smith & Seward, 2020). Moreover, crowdsourcing has been seen as a way of strengthening the case for seeking public, government and funding agency approval (El Khatib et al., 2020) by having a broader evidence base to enhance credibility and reliability in the collection and transfer of data. By empowering citizens to play a role in obtaining data, analysing results, advancing discoveries, and improving the presentation of outcomes, citizen science and crowdsourcing expand the exchange, dissemination and educational potential of research and knowledge. Furthermore, crowdsourcing can improve outreach by enabling the leveraging of external networks of existing online communities (Askin, 2015).

Although the use of citizen science, crowdsourcing, participatory research, and open sourcing has grown significantly in the museum sector over the past decade, its use in academic research is still limited, with different routes taken by different disciplines (Wazny, 2017). In the humanities, crowdsourcing has involved the improvement and transformation of content through, for example, descriptions of objects, people and events, and the synthesis and analysis of information from multiple sources (Hedges & Dunn, 2018; Terras, 2016). Crowdsourcing is particularly useful for those working in fields of history, culture and heritage, and especially within museums whose fundamental mission has increasingly been to enhance public participation and engage wider audiences with their collections. Many museums with limited financial support and reliance on volunteers have developed a longstanding symbiotic relationship with the community. Yet given that the concept of crowdsourcing originated in the business world, and with the growing utilisation of crowdsourcing for both commercial and not-for-profit projects, it is not surprising that there are many differing motivators for citizen engagement in the cultural heritage sector more broadly (Owens, 2013).

Whatever the motivation in specific cases, crowdsourcing in the museum sector provides a flexible framework for mutually beneficial engagement between institutions and audiences for the co-creation of content and collections. Through the development of more open, connected and smart cultural heritage systems that use accessible, linked, interoperable infrastructure, museums have been seeking to engage their stakeholders to transfer knowledge for shared benefit (Oomen & Aroyo, 2011). Rather than paying participants, they have invited the public to help them build on existing resources or create new ones. This external assistance can take many forms. For example, contributors may offer items to be considered for inclusion in collections, or they may provide new information that may help with the presentation or description of existing exhibits, or they may be able to use cultural records to chart, revise, document and enrich materials (Carletti et al., 2013). Institutions can draw upon public engagement for labour-intensive tasks such as transcribing handwritten texts into digital form where expert knowledge of the content is not essential. They can also use it for more specialised tasks that may need to be undertaken under the supervision of experts or in collaboration with them. Whatever form it takes, effective crowdsourcing can free up staff and budgets. There are also many intangible rewards for staff who work with citizens, including sharing their knowledge and experience, gaining access to a flow of external feedback from people who are willing to invest their time, and having a direct line of connection with local communities and their responses. The vast variety of daily work required in all kinds of collecting institutions including museums means that there is wide scope for sharing the load, including for tasks such as: categorising and cataloguing with structured, descriptive metadata; correcting and modifying content; collaboratively tagging content and linking data via semantic tags; providing contextual details for artefacts and associating these with other relevant information; locating complementary objects to be included in online collections; helping to record and curate memories and intangible data; mapping visual, spatial, cultural and geographical representations; translating content across interconnected and interdependent users; and, in some cases, even co-curating the design and management of exhibits (Hedges & Dunn, 2018).

Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable organisations to maintain and energise key activities in the context of expanding opportunities but dwindling funds and resources. Digital technologies can open up and link resources. They can enable the preservation of knowledge and collections that may otherwise be lost and promote democratic and innovative approaches to the management and safeguarding of collections (Arthur et al., 2018). But these technologies require constant work to establish, maintain and update them. For this crowdsourcing can be a valuable aid. The idea of the ‘crowd’ within heritage crowdsourcing projects does not necessarily imply large groups of people: crowdsourcing often refers to a small group of interested and engaged citizens who may already have a relationship with the topic in question (Terras, 2016). The key objective of their work is to interact with, explore and, where appropriate, enhance the historical record.

With the ongoing development of interactive online platforms, crowdsourcing can provide a mechanism for the co-creation of knowledge in support of the objectives of museums while at the same time helping to integrate collecting institutions more closely into their communities. In other words, crowdsourcing is now seen ‘as a continuation of the use of available platforms and communications networks to distribute tasks amongst large numbers of interested individuals, working towards a common goal’ (Terras, 2016, p. 4). Rather than merely being an instrument to involve citizens in the delivery of more and better quality content to end users, crowdsourcing allows users to participate in the actual development and use of ‘public memory’—which has been the fundamental remit of museums, archives and collections since their establishment (Terras, 2016).

3. Benefits and Challenges of Crowdsourcing for GLAM

The benefits of crowdsourcing are multiple and they vary according to the nature of the organisation, its culture and the level of participation. Crowdsourcing can involve distributed voluntary labour to gather only small portions of information in the form of text, image, video and audio; or it can entail collaboration throughout an entire project including problem definition, data collection and analysis, presentation and preservation (Hedges & Dunn, 2018). By engaging citizens rather than researchers and professionals working in isolation behind physical or virtual walls, crowdsourcing can address cultural institutions’ limitations in terms of human, financial and technical resources. They can provide ways of addressing challenges such as the time-consuming demands of conservation and preservation or the pressure on physical space, location and opening hours that all hinder broader access to collections (Ridge, 2014). Similarly, it can provide support where knowledge or expertise is limited and in cases where engaged citizens can provide more information, or complete tasks that technology alone cannot manage (Wazny, 2017). Digital images of handwritten documents and texts can be difficult to read and decipher, and while advances are underway in developing automated handwriting recognition, these technical solutions are still prone to error. Transforming materials such as these into useful and searchable information sources can be impossible without human resources to transcribe, annotate and translate, while at the same time extracting additional information such as dates, locations, and subjects depicted in, for example, photographs or illustrations (Chung, 2019). By building new user groups or linking co-existing groups and communities through multi-directional communication, crowdsourcing can actively engage the public with the institution, its systems, and collections (Holley, 2010). When activated by museums, and in collaboration with humanities scholars, crowdsourcing can help open up and link resources, enabling novel discoveries in archival records and collections (Arthur, 2018). It can also reach previously ‘untapped’ external knowledge, expertise and interest, thereby raising public awareness, transcending geopolitical boundaries, and facilitating greater equity of access and democratisation of knowledge (Albornoz et al., 2018; Okune et al., 2019). Moreover, through building a relationship with the ‘crowd’, museums can improve the quality and value of data and their collections can gain stronger public interest and deeper trust, which in turn can encourage a sense of public ownership and commitment toward cultural heritage collections (Terras, 2016).

The rise of crowdsourcing and digital citizenship has positioned museums to become participatory knowledge organisations, leading the way to create a socially constructed creative commons through facilitating new forms of citizen participation (Borda & Bowen, 2021). Free, open access allows institutions and communities to reuse, mix and aggregate digital heritage content. This process can reveal unexpected connections that open up new perspectives and insights, while leaving a digital trail that may point to trends in emerging forms of digital cultural consumption (Navarrete, 2020).

Despite the many benefits it brings, crowdsourcing still encounters numerous challenges (see

Table 1. Benefits and challenges to crowdsourcing in GLAM.

Benefits

Challenges

Address limitations caused by human, financial and technical resources, physical space, location and opening hours Engage the audience rather than working alone with museum professionals Facilitate the co-creation of knowledge Digitalise handwritten documents, texts, photos, maps, etc., that cannot be easily deciphered by machines Extract additional information such as dates, locations, and subjects Transform materials into useful and searchable information sources Open up and link resources to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections Reach previously ‘untapped’ external knowledge, expertise and interest Discover, collect, and preserve knowledge that may otherwise be lost Improve the quality and value of data

Levels of participation, e.g., tokenism, one-off input, low community interest, or unrealistic community expectations Maintenance of motivation, quality and consistency of participation and input Concerns around transparency and governance, quality, safety and intellectual property rights of ‘free labour’ Hidden costs and complexities of setting up platforms, interfaces and data structures, and checking, processing and analysing transcribed materials Provision of education or assistance to untrained community volunteers Engaging citizens from a broad socio-demographic spectrum and diverse backgrounds Overcoming barriers of language and digital literacy, Internet affordability and coverage, access to devices and data stability

). The points listed in the table below (benefits and challenges) have been synthesised by the authors from the analysis of the literature referred to in this review.

Ethical issues around ‘free labour’ remain a particular concern, especially with the development of business-oriented aggregator platforms focused on large-scale crowdsourcing for repetitive micro-tasks (Hirth et al., 2017). However, there are also non-commercial crowdsourcing platforms, such as Zooniverse. These can take various forms, for example: ‘mediator platforms’, which facilitate engagement between the institution or project team and the ‘crowd’; or ‘specialised crowdsourcing platforms’ that target specific subgroups of workers or crowds; or ‘crowd provision platforms’, which identify potential participants. At the technical level, these platforms provide infrastructure to run crowdsourcing tasks through software tools designed to upload, store, check and correct images, documents, and data. At the conceptual level, the platforms vary according to the specific task at hand, yet few provide demographic information such as age, sex, location, or the socio-cultural backgrounds represented in the crowd (Hirth et al., 2017). To maintain motivation, quality, and consistency of participation and input, crowdsourcing requires transparency of governance, with members feeling a degree of ownership of the final product (Navarrete, 2020). While well-known open-source software such as Debian GNU/Linux provides a free means through which the crowd can play an active role, this requires the oversight of management to monitor quality and safety, and address intellectual property rights to the work (Berg et al., 2018). The hidden costs of crowdsourcing further add to these barriers (Riley-Reid, 2015). In practice, attracting participants to crowdsourcing initiatives is time-consuming and complex, requiring the setting up of platforms, interfaces and data structures, and the checking, processing and analysing of transcribed materials (Hendery & Gibson, 2019). Moreover, participation in crowdsourced work is often short-term, especially in cases where those involved receive limited engagement, compensation or feedback (Ettlinger, 2016).

Crowdsourcing platforms continue to evolve in terms of providing better support to collaborators, including creating a more robust Internet-connected software environment, strengthening communication channels between the institutions or academics and their crowds, improving microtask monitoring, and capturing richer demographic information about participants. Such improvements aim at maximising user interest and engagement, and online platform support (Hirth et al., 2017).

A key challenge for museums and cultural heritage services is their need to address multiple goals. They have a commitment to the preservation and development of cultural heritage, but they also need to provide attractive and engaging public outcomes, while also raising awareness and knowledge around significant issues of social value and social justice (Navarrete, 2020; Ng et al., 2017). While many museums and cultural organisations are socially engaged with their digital citizens, studies have shown that the majority of those who participate in crowdsourcing come from a relatively small pool of people who already have a relationship with the institution. They have similar socio-demographic backgrounds and are typically even less diverse overall than the museum’s visitors (Bonacchi et al., 2019; Terras, 2016). Although some institutions have promoted the need for ‘playful’ crowdsourcing (Agostino, 2015), participation requires not only time but also access to information and communication technologies such as computers, Internet networks and mobile phones—a problem amplified by the existing digital divide and the world-wide challenges of inequitable distribution of technology and resources (Borda & Bowen, 2021).

Millions of citizens globally have been completely shut out of the digital revolution and the potential benefits of openness and inclusion (UNESCO, 2020). Internet affordability and coverage, access to devices, data stability, language and digital literacy are key barriers to online participation (Rowsell et al., 2017). The digital divide occurs not only between but also within countries, with historically marginalised communities, Indigenous and ethnic minorities, and those living in regional areas having low digital inclusion (Albornoz et al., 2018; Chan et al., 2011; Larivière et al., 2015). Moves are underway to address these barriers, with some museums assuming new approaches, technologies and environments to decolonise their legacies and engage more marginalised audiences (Chipangura & Mataga, 2021). However, in practice, many struggle to reach out to under-represented groups (Borda & Bowen, 2021; Reynolds, 2017).

4. Strengthening Diversity in Crowdsourcing

Museums are making gradual progress toward gender, socio-economic and geographic inclusion, but their histories have been steeped in white, male, highly educated and privileged norms (Bonacchi et al., 2019). Often the knowledge infrastructure of museums has been framed and packaged according to the socio-political views of those who have formed part of their foundation (Albornoz et al., 2018), and even when efforts have been made to represent other groups, these have been critiqued as ‘shallow’ and ‘tokenising’ rather than transformative (Ng et al., 2017). There is a growing call for scholars, curators, designers and promoters of crowdsourcing tools and platforms to increase the participation of user communities in their planning and design, to ensure the creation of more useable, inclusive and sustainable systems (Hicks, 2017; Okune et al., 2019). Increasingly there is a need for museums to question ‘who forms the crowd’, ‘what role should they play’, ‘how should they be engaged in the process’, ‘what mediums should be used’, and ‘what rewards should they gain’ (Wazny, 2017).

Central to this has been the emphasis on nichesourcing for targeted cultural inclusion and representation to enrich museums’ collections and make them more meaningful (De Boer et al., 2012; Hendery & Gibson, 2019; Vincent, 2017). Nichesourcing is a form of crowdsourcing in which the selected crowd is a ‘niche community’ of people with specific knowledge, interests or backgrounds (De Boer et al., 2012). However, in most cases, wide-ranging inclusivity in the design, management and use of crowdsourcing projects and infrastructure is vital to building a fair framework for participation (Zourou, 2020). While often invisible to the public, the involvement of key groups in the foundational work of producing digital tools, platforms and networks is central to their success and sustainability (Zourou, 2020). The active participation of diverse actors in designing crowdsourcing platforms can make a significant contribution towards addressing current intersectional biases in digital infrastructure. Rather than being regarded as ‘suppliers’ of information, crowdsourcing platforms can be considered from the ‘demand’ side, as facilitators—of networking, sharing and repurposing—to address the specific needs of diverse communities (Okune et al., 2019). This perspective frames the concept of crowdsourcing in social and cultural terms, with participants inserting external contemporary knowledge and viewpoints into existing institutional processes within museums.

Engaging local teams and marginalised groups in crowdsourcing and recognising their diverse identities, unique histories, languages and forms of expression are invaluable for sharing knowledge (Arthur, 2018). Projects therefore require collaborative communication from the very start, with co-creation of a shared vocabulary, digital texts, visual modes and sounds that are representative across genres to promote generative creativity and participatory structures (Okune et al., 2019). Diverse teams can enable rich data linkages across disciplines (digital humanities, social sciences, culture and communication, languages, history, education, and the sciences), as well as advanced research on language transmission and adaptation, and ultimately promotion and recognition of cultural diversity and intercultural understanding. For participants, feeling a sense of common purpose, interest, and connection with each other and with a topic and its place in history, promotes social inclusiveness. In this way, museums can function as advocates of change, moving beyond their primary roles of collecting and presenting objects to become decolonising agents of social transformation, engaging communities in historical and topical issues that affect them (Chipangura & Mataga, 2021).

Reaching diverse groups requires welcoming the crowd’s diverse languages (Heinisch, 2021). Linguistic diversity in crowdsourcing can provide different ways of viewing specific issues, thus reducing cultural biases and increasing appreciation and awareness (Heinisch, 2021). Crowdsourcing infrastructure can support, translate and produce locally relevant knowledge in diverse languages, making it possible to more responsively inform public debate and help build inclusive societies (Mounier, 2018). Through embracing multilingual practices and formats, online platforms can offer better access, more effective communication, and more meaningful digital preservation, as well as contributing to the sustainability of local languages and their cultural history (Hendery & Gibson, 2019).

5. Conclusions

Advances in digital technologies have enabled museums to respond more effectively to increasing pressure to democratise content, facilitate wider public engagement, and reach diverse global audiences. In particular, museums have been exploring and adopting new crowdsourcing techniques. This paper has illustrated how crowdsourcing is driving a critical shift in the role museums are playing by mobilising and capitalising on the skills of audiences, and enhancing remote access to collections (Mika et al., 2017). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, museums refocused their resources onto developing digital content and reaching diverse audiences. This required that they move beyond a hierarchical one-way flow of information to multi-dimensional and active dialogues that could sustain wider visitor interest and attract new types of participation.

Museum practitioners and citizens are now connecting on site and in digital environments to assist with various activities ranging from transcribing and annotating data to identifying and curating collection items. They are expanding research capacity through a community approach to preserving and enriching cultural heritage (Heinisch, 2021). Museums are using crowdsourcing and citizen-engaged projects to present a greater variety of stories involving diverse participants. The dynamic nature of contemporary digital communication communities means that crowdsourced records of potential historical value are being created each second; the challenge is how to prioritise and also preserve them, as public records worthy of presentation and display within and beyond museums (Arthur, 2018). Museum collections can evolve and be enriched through citizen-led participation. Where they are supported through local initiatives and open research and open data mandates, they can provide a productive digital environment as part of a wider ecosystem for the sharing and co-creation of knowledge (Mika et al., 2017). Crowdsourcing is enabling new and diverse voices to enter museum spaces and to play a key role in repositioning them as contemporary arenas that better reflect their communities.

6. Future Directions

Numerous initiatives in the museum sector are employing crowdsourcing techniques and reaping their benefits. By addressing the challenges of inclusivity, crowdsourcing provides a vehicle for critical reflection and information sharing, not only on holdings but also on crowdsourcing practices themselves, and on how to develop flexible tools that work across contexts, and educational programmes to foster communities in the process (Crowdsourcing Consortium, 2015). This dynamic kind of engagement has been supported through policies that enable museums to be linked to new and more diverse populations. Governments in Europe, for example, have incorporated crowdsourcing and citizen science into their policies around open science, open innovation, open government, and open data initiatives. The European Citizen Science Association in partnership with other institutions has outlined a set of principles that underscore inclusion, diversity, creativity and social innovation. They emphasise ethics, transparency, and fairness in processes, including those relating to the recruitment of participants, as well as establishing data protocols for ease of understanding, recognition and communication of outcomes (European Citizen Science Association, 2015). Beyond the broader concepts of open science and open scholarship, citizen science and crowdsourcing are being recognised as ways of involving far more actors in the innovation process, including researchers, entrepreneurs, users, governments and civil society (Zourou, 2020).

The University College London’s Transcribe Bentham digital platform, launched in 2010, was one early large-scale platform to shape the landscape for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. This project successfully engaged a wide online audience in the transcription, correction and improvement of over 25,000 pages of original and unstudied manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham, his correspondents, and assistants. This has uncovered new information and opened up new directions for scholarly research on Bentham (Causer & Terras, 2014). Since then, many approaches to crowdsourcing have been employed by major collecting institutions beyond the museum sector, including the National Library of Australia, the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Transcription Centre was developed in 2013 to provide transcription, translation, and discussion features for collection items, including field notebooks, diaries, logbooks, specimens, and more (Mika et al., 2017). This successful programme is maintained by a significant number of citizen scholar volunteers—researchers, educators, amateur social scientists, and historians (Mika et al., 2017). Zooniverse is the largest not-for-profit, volunteer-based crowdsourcing platform, and as such represents the potential democratising power of heritage crowdsourcing (Bonacchi et al., 2019). It enables museums, galleries and other state-funded archival institutions to run crowdsourcing projects, using strategies such as micro-tasking—breaking down and distributing tasks according to levels of intelligence, interests and desires—to improve data quality and mitigate against user fatigue and boredom (Mika et al., 2017). In Australia, DigiVol was developed by the Australian Museum and the Atlas of Living Australia to explore and develop methods and technologies for engaging volunteers to assist in the rapid digitisation and registration of museum specimens (Flemons & Berents, 2012).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday lives shifted to online spaces for communication, knowledge dissemination and collaboration (Pawlicka-Deger, 2021). The pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, have also highlighted the inequitable distribution of resources and technology on the global scale. To keep pace with various societal pressures and changes, the International Council for Museums recently redefined the remit of museums to include a focus on ‘human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing’ by working ‘in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world’ (ICOM, 2019). This also implicitly acknowledged the very real and entrenched disparities in access and education in the global North versus the global South which were amplified further during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Platforms such as Europeana—the European portal for cultural heritage—have been pushing to invite diverse voices into conversations about the meaningful digital transformation of museums, with the aim of changing organisational responsibilities and addressing bias and discrimination in the heritage sector. CrowdHeritage—an open platform developed with the support of the European Commission—is providing crowdsourcing as a means of improving the metadata stored by Europeana and raising awareness and understanding of cultural heritage assets. By inviting communities beyond existing audiences, museums and collecting institutions more broadly can collaborate with people who have been historically marginalised and proactively democratise cultural engagement. This process can include developing platforms that offer training to the crowd (Prpić et al., 2015) and creating museum education experiences that are evocative and relevant to more visitors, not only those coming from positions of privilege (Ng et al., 2017). It also requires moving beyond the passive crowdsourcing microtasks of collecting, transcribing and tagging data for collection and exhibition, toward exploring more dynamic processes. These include the development of safe and participatory spaces for online dialogue that are aligned with the museum’s vision, strategy and operation, while at the same time being aware of colonialist legacies. Effective crowdsourcing also, importantly, provides the opportunity and the obligation to respect the needs, identity and ownership of marginalized, Indigenous and local communities by making physical and online museum spaces as interactive and inclusive as possible (Smith & Seward, 2020).