Crowdsourcing cultural heritage collections can help address issues of limited budgets, uncover more of the unfindable backlog, and create advocates to support organizations. It enables critical thinking by allowing curiosity through crowdsourced contributions. This helps develop historical thinking skills around change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency. It also puts collections in the spotlight and helps make more content findable and usable, assuming digitization can occur.

1. A modest proposal: crowdsourcing in
cultural heritage benefits us all.
Dr. Mia Ridge, digitalresearch@bl.uk
BL Labs workshop, September 2018

2. Premise 1: 'fake news' is a menace
The world needs more critical (cynical) thinkers.
Curiosity enabled through crowdsourcing can be
a gateway to the 'five C's of historical thinking:
change and continuity over time, causality,
context, complexity, and contingency

3. Premise 2: budgets never match needs
Crowdsourcing can help make the 'unfindable'
backlog findable (and used)
(Assuming you can digitise collections in the
first place)

4. Premise 3: budgets will always be at risk
GLAMs need a wide range of advocates.
Crowdsourcing can create vocal fans of
organisations and their collections.

5. Put your collections in the spotlight!
Thank you for listening.
http://playbills.libcrowds.com/
Thanks to: Alex Mendes, Christian Algar, Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott and our 1600+ volunteers