I’m interested in talking about the evolution of crowdsourcing in a digital sense, and in hearing about solutions, problems, and pie-in-the-sky future ideas.

Staff at the Library of Congress and NARA posted images to Flickr Commons, and have found that users enjoy adding metadata and interacting with the materials. Museum efforts such as the Brooklyn Museum Posse and the Steve project have attempted to provide users with a way to actively interact with their websites.

I’d like to talk about other things that we could do to engage users, and to go beyond the traditional model of “users taking information from archives” to a “two-way” model where users can give us their photos, tweets, GIS data, podcasts, pictures from their iPhones, etc in more of a conversational structure than has previously existed between archives and end user.. Can we use this as a way to meet users where they are? Will both parties receive something of “value” from the transaction, and how do we figure out what that “value” might be?

How can a repository incorporate some of these ideas within the current boundaries of “collection” and what would need to change in order to add other ideas? How might institutions collaborate– locally, regionally, nationally, or across disciplines– to accomplish some of these things?

In some sense, I’m most interested in talking about the user or patron as an active creator and participant in the experience of using archives, museums, libraries and other humanities resources.  I’d love to sit and chat about this in groups small and large, and I’m looking forward to talking with everyone in Columbus!