Dear all,
With the start of the new year, Crowd Cafe returns to Boston University Libraries. Co-presented with Boston College Libraries, this is a monthly event taking place on the third Friday of every month, 1-3pm,
online via a Zoom meeting and also
at Mugar Memorial Library. We hope you will join us for as many of these meetings as you can, and contribute to one or more crowdsourcing projects of your choice.
Why contribute? It's a real, specific good you can do for cultural and intellectual heritage. The transcription and other crowdsourcing projects being served by Crowd Cafe can't be done by machines — and there's a lot
of material needing human eyes on it out there. As you do the (easy and enjoyable) work, questions of knowledge production inevitably come up: who gets to do it? What effect does our choice to do this work have on the legacy we leave to the future? How can
we effect social change via small but sustained periods of engagement with cultural heritage collections that aim towards similar social change?
What kind of projects? So many kinds. Follow the Crowd Cafe link above for an incomplete but representative listing. This fall I am particularly interested in the
Transcribe to Digitize challenge at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (a WGBH and Library of Congress collaboration). Other CC favorites are Boston Public Library's
Anti-Slavery Manuscripts project, a variety of subjects covered at the
Smithsonian Transcription Center, and disaster relief mapping for the Red Cross at the
Open Street Map Tasking Manager.
We hope you can join us today, or on the third Friday of a different month. Please pass the word along to your colleagues and/or students, as well.
-Vika
--
Dr. Vika Zafrin
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Boston University
+1 617.358.6370 | bu.edu/disc
she/her/hers
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