Like Colin and Lauren, I agree that this is a useful and well-balanced overview of folksonomies in crowdsourcing. I especially like your example of Wellesley’s use of the alumni newsletters as a way for the archive to collect information about specific photographs–not only because alumni connected to the photos can add needed metadata for the collection descriptions, but also because it’s a way to promote the archives’ holdings and develop user interest among alumni who are not necessarily connected to the chosen photographs.

I also appreciate your bringing in the article on analyzing user-generated metadata, with suggestions for refinement of the experiment. As you suggest, it would be an interesting research project to compare the results with other experiments of a similar nature–not just in image-based institutions, but across the GLAM world.

This is a great overview of the current state of the field for folksonomies. You do a great job of covering the many benefits for participants, institutions, and end-users of content that this crowdsourcing technique promises. You are right to identify one major obstacle in the great deal of work that folksonomy games and other interfaces require to keep sustainable. Even though these crowdsourcing efforts do bring in a lot of volunteer labor for institutions, they also require a lot of work in house so that they don’t become defunct—however, I would argue that labor and cost saving should NOT be one of the main reasons that institutions pursue these kinds of efforts, so additional upkeep inhouse should not be a huge deterrent. Rather, institutions need to pursue these kinds of crowdsourcing efforts for the many other reasons you mention, such as increased engagement by a community of users and wider access to resources for users with varied backgrounds.

There is one other potential obstacle to these projects though that I think is important to consider: actually gaining a critical mass of participants so that the project is able to get off the ground. Wikipedia, as you discuss, is a great example of such a critical mass that allows for information to be fact checked and kept up to date. Although there are other gender, race, and class biases with this community of users that also need to be addressed with Wikipedia, there are a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable. This is often not the case with smaller scale crowdsourcing efforts at lower profile institutions. There are certainly still benefits for smaller institutions to launch these kinds of projects, but the staff will need to do more legwork to get the projects off the ground, including advertising their projects over social media platforms or targeting a very specific community (as with the Wellesley project that you mention.)

Hey Lauren—
Glad to introduce you to folksonomies officially! They were what got me through Organization of Information with Losee. I think why they’re so delightful is that (if planned properly) they ground the gamification movement in tangible, usable products. We’ve spoken a good deal in past few class sessions on relinquishing control. Most GLAMs already have controlled vocabularies in place within their catalogue, but the more free-form folksonomy vocabularies can behave as support to the more controlled model—It doesn’t have to be all control or all chaos. The real struggle, though, is that most places don’t account for the amount of planning on the back end between user interface and the IT department’s coordination. Which is why so many of the gamified tagging programs that intended to incorporate results are defunct. This is why we need more digitally literate librarian-types spearheading these projects!

While I think I have heard the term “folksonomy” buzzing around a little bit before, your use of it here might be my official introduction, so thanks! I’m surprised it has not come up in any of my classes so far, especially Intro to Archives or Organization of Information. I haven’t really spent much time tagging work for fun but I can see how just a few minutes here and there by a number of museum nerds can really free up some employee time. Your example from Wellesley College’s collection of alumni brings up the point JJ made in class about the rareness of someone serendipitously spotting their uncle in a photo in the collection, but at least with a more focused project family of the alum or the alum herself would know what they were looking for and perhaps be motivated to help in a way that is mutually beneficial to alumni and the archive, so that sounds like a perfect use of this type of crowdsourcing.