Survey – How important is user-generated content for memory institutions?
By Lars Wieneke, Researcher at Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe.
In 2005, Time magazine declared 'You', the individual content creator on the internet, as its 'Person of the Year'. While Time didn't invent user-generated content, the accolade brought public attention to the effort of individual volunteers that have invested millions of hours of work on building large-scale repositories for video (YouTube), images (Flickr) and knowledge (Wikipedia). Since then, user-generated content (UGC) has become part of our everyday lives. Some of us now naturally create and share our stories and experiences with each other through UGC.
Very often this creation takes place outside of the institutional framework but some memory institutions have found ways and means to make user contributions a meaningful part of their mission. The Europeana Network Task Force on Understanding the Role of User-Generated Content in Europeana, which has nine members, wants to gather these experiences to encourage a discussion at the Network level about the role and relevance of user-generated content, the obvious and hidden challenges of its application and potential future ecosystems that could be shared between all members of the Network.
User-Generated Content Task Force meeting, Hilversum, The Netherlands
As a first part of this mission, we invite you to fill in a short survey so that we can find out more about the status quo of user-generated content. Who uses it and how? Who doesn't use it and why not? What can we learn from each other and what kind of services could the Europeana Network offer to turn user-generated content into a true asset for its stakeholders?
The survey launched at the beginning of May and so far more than 20 institutions have responded, showing a great diversity of uses. In the next phase of our Task Force, we will conduct individual interviews with members who want to share their best practices. Then in autumn this year, look out for the results! We will share them on the Europeana Network LinkedIn page, this blog and during the Europeana Network Annual General Meeting.
The survey is open until 28 May and takes less than 8 minutes to complete. Even if you have no experience with user-generated content, your voice is important to us, as we also want to find out more about the obstacles and concerns regarding UGC.