CrowdHeritage: a crowdsourcing platform for enriching Europeana metadata

An open platform for digitised cultural items

A lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata affects the searchability and usability of digital content stored in museums, libraries and archives. In this context, crowdsourcing offers a great opportunity both to improve the metadata quality of digital cultural content and raise awareness about cultural heritage assets among professionals, teachers, students and culture lovers. Running from September 2018 to February 2020, CrowdHeritage is a Europeana Generic Services project which looks to take advantage of this opportunity through the development of an open platform where public audiences can participate in crowdsourcing campaigns around cultural heritage. Campaigns on the website focus on music, fashion, sport, cities and landscapes.

The project aims to engage different communities in enhancing content metadata, evaluate the usability of the platform and assess the effectiveness of the overall approach, both in terms of data quality improvement and user engagement. The platform also offers cultural heritage institutions and aggregators the opportunity to design and launch ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns for metadata quality improvement with gamification elements and measurable results. The platform is available in three different languages (English, French, Italian) and is easy to access through digital devices. CrowdHeritage is for everyone - a simple and fun way to discover the richness and variety of cultural heritage. 

Discover the campaigns 

Each crowdsourcing campaign on CrowdHeritage has been curated by one of the project’s partners, who include the National Technical University of Athens, the European Fashion Heritage Association, the French Ministry of Culture, Europeana Foundation, and the Michael Culture Association. The campaigns encourage the exploration of digitised collections from cultural heritage institutions accessed through Europeana Collections. Through CrowdHeritage, users can either suggest new annotations or descriptions about particular items, and validate or reject existing descriptions in a user-friendly and attractive way. 

The campaigns are open for two months and include the following themes: 

• Catwalk colours was curated by the European Fashion Heritage Association and allowed you to validate the automatically extracted colours of the outfits in catwalk photos from three iconic couture collections in the EFHA archives. Open until 30 November 2019. 

• Early musical instruments, curated by the French Ministry of Culture, encourages you to tag instruments in images. Open until 14 December 2019. 

• Representations of famous composers, curated by the French Ministry of Culture, allows you to identify famous composers including Liszt, Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Open until 14 December 2019. 

• Fashion garments type, curated by the European Fashion Heritage Association, allows users to add and validate different historical fashion garments. Open until 20 December 2019. 

• Sports and leisure, curated by the Michael Culture Association, allows you to identify and validate types of sport and sporting events, equipment and clothes in an image. Open until 3 January 2020. 

• Cities and landscapes, also curated by the Michael Culture Association encourages you to describe types of buildings, transportation, landscapes, geographical elements and jobs in different images. Open until 3 January 2020.

Get involved 

To get involved in CrowdHeritage, simply make an account and contribute to the campaigns! All you need to register is an email or a Google or Facebook account. At the end of each campaign, the most active contributors receive Amazon coupons for €100, €75 or €50, and all contributors can take part in an evaluation survey to share their thoughts and give feedback on the platform.  

You can also follow CrowdHeritage on Twitter and like, retweet and share the project using the hashtag #CrowdHeritageEU.

Finally, If you are interested in creating your own campaign to improve your collection metadata, you can contact the team at CrowdHeritage.

The CrowdHeritage project is co-funded by the European Commission under the CEF programme for 2014-2020.