Examples of Onlne Archives that Allow Users to Add Metadata?

December 1, 2008 9:50 AM

I am looking for examples of online history archives that allow users to tag, annotate, and otherwise attach information to items in the collection. I know about Footnote.com where users may add annotations, dates, names, and searchable text to documents. I know about the Flickr Library of Congress photostream. What other examples should I know about before my institution embarks on a similar project?

I have also read this previous AskMe about Museums and the Social Web which gave me some good tips.

I work at the Washington State Digital Archives and we want to take a fascinating set of territorial court records and put them on line. The index is already online, the plan is to scan the actual documents and put them up as well. We would like users to be able to add searchable metadata to the records. Thanks!

posted by LarryC to education (10 comments total)

Just to make sure, you know that the LoC thing is part of a larger Flickr initiative that helps institutions do this, it's called Flickr for Good. They have some smart people working there who might be able to point you in the right directions as well. I'm fairly certain the way it works is two-way, that is once people add things like tags you can also get them back OUT into whatever db set up you have. Another project I know if is the Scriblio project [my pal Casey works on it] which uses a wordpress backend and some WP mods to do a very simple version of this. Example: Beyond Brown Paper. Good if you're working with volunteers.
posted by jessamyn at 10:10 AM on December 1, 2008

The National Archives (ours, not yours) has a set of wiki pages called Your Archives, enabling users to contribute information to supplement the official catalogue. State Papers Online, a subscription database which launched last week, has a function allowing users to add corrections and annotations.

The last time I looked at Your Archives (about six months ago) most of the active users seemed to be members of the National Archives' own staff. I looked at it again just now and the user base seems to have expanded slightly, but it still doesn't appear to be generating a great deal of useful information from members of the public. Some sort of online forum might have been a better way of getting users to talk among themselves and feel part of a genuine community (though of course you still need a core group of active and committed users to keep the whole thing going). It will be interesting to see if State Papers Online manages to do any better. From what I've seen of SPO, the metadata is of very variable quality, so user annotation could make a big difference; the difficulty may be that academic users will be more inclined to keep their discoveries to themselves rather than going out of their way to share information with the community! We shall see.
posted by verstegan at 10:47 AM on December 1, 2008

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections at University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library uses the Everything2 engine to allow commenting and other information.
posted by anarchivist at 10:52 AM on December 1, 2008

For what it's worth, I can also point you in the direction of a few journal articles about this stuff too.
posted by anarchivist at 11:00 AM on December 1, 2008

Omeka allows two-way tagging and so on, I believe. From George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, who are also responsible for Zotero, the handy online (and offline) research tool.
posted by notyou at 11:30 AM on December 1, 2008

Mapskip isn't targeted as such but is used in quite a few educational settings.
posted by Ookseer at 12:40 PM on December 1, 2008

Jessamyn: Thanks, I did not know about Flickr for Good.

Anarchivist: Love your user name! Yes, please send me cites to the articles. Or better yet post them here for posterity.

Notyou: I definitely remember two-way tagging being part of a demonstration of Omeka at the American Historical Association in January, but I cannot find an Omeka-built site with this feature implemented.

Thanks all!
posted by LarryC at 4:46 PM on December 1, 2008

notyou: Oy, don't get me started on Omeka.

LarryC: I'll post them soon!
posted by anarchivist at 5:56 PM on December 1, 2008

The Beyond Brown Paper photo archive depends on the comments submitted by former residents of the paper mill towns of northern NH (example a, example b). The Colby-Sawyer College archive encourages commenting and tagging from users.

Both sites are built on Scriblio, an open source library/archives plugin for WordPress. Full disclosure: I'm the lead developer for Scriblio.
posted by misterbisson at 9:02 PM on December 1, 2008

LarryC: I wouldn't exactly say it's adding metadata, but you might also be interested in UMarmot at the Special Collections and University Archives at UMass Amherst.
posted by anarchivist at 11:02 AM on December 4, 2008