CrowdHeritage Platform

• April 12, 2024
• admin

CrowdHeritage is a project which ran from 2018 to 2020, which developed the standalone online platform CrowdHeritage.eu – an accessible platform supporting the coordination of online fund-raising campaigns for improving the quality of digital content and cultural heritage metadata. The project brought together 5 partners: National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Europeana Foundation (The Netherlands), Michael Culture (Belgium), Europeana Fashion International Association (Italy), and Ministère de la Culture (France).

Practical applications

The platform offers the opportunity for cultural heritage institutions and aggregators (museums, aggregators, archives, and libraries) to design and run crowdsourcing campaigns and engage with various user communities to enrich their collections. Through these campaigns, users are able to add annotations or validate existing ones in a user-friendly and engaging manner. Primarily utilised by cultural heritage institutions across Europe and beyond, it enables the enhancement of collection quality while engaging diverse audiences in an interactive manner. The augmented data subsequently finds its place in Europeana, the European cultural heritage portal, enhancing the accessibility and utility of digital collections.

Over the course of the project, six pan-European crowdsourcing campaigns surrounding 4 thematics: 2 fashion campaigns, 2 music campaigns, European cities & landscapes, and sports.

The CrowdHeritage platform is also being utilised within the educational sector and for citizen science initiatives. Originally developed by the National Technical University of Athens with support from the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program, it is presently overseen and expanded by Datoptron, a spinoff company of the National Technical University of Athens.

Harnessing collective intelligence

CrowdHeritage is utilised to harness the collective intelligence of both large and small groups of individuals to annotate metadata with diverse types of information, ranging from semantic terms derived from relevant vocabularies to geographical locations, colours, free-text tags, and more. These campaigns also serve as a means of increasing awareness about the collections of Cultural Heritage organisations among broader audiences, including professionals in the field, enthusiasts of culture, students, and the general public.