Crowdsourcing and online archives

In honor of the World War I centenary, the British National Archives have opened up a great new database - The British Army War Diaries 1914-1922.

 

This database contains over 1.5 million pages of war diaries and over the next few years the archives will be working on digitizing more appeal tribunals and service records of the Household Cavalry. The Archives currently has thousands of appeals against conscription, POW interviews, nurses' service records, Women's Army Auxiliary Corps service records, images, and Durham Home Guard records (WWII) digitized and searchable on their website.  

In and of itself, the database is a fantastic resource for researchers, but they're making it better by tagging the 1.5 million papers with names, dates, locations, happenings, and more. This undertaking would take years and millions of dollars (well, pounds) with an archive team working on it, but they're already almost half-way through because of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, as defined by Wikipedia is "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers." Computers can easily read typed letters in an image - like when you have a pdf of a document - however, they have a hard time accurately reading handwriting. Humans, unlike computers, can read handwriting and use context to figure out most words that aren't immediately legible. To safeguard against bad transcriptions, they have many people work on the same piece. If the same tag or transcription is used by multiple users for a document, only then will those tags and transcriptions be officially added to the record.

The main organization putting together scientific and historic crowdsourcing is Zooniverse. They have twenty different projects currently going on. If you aren't interested in WWI history, maybe you'd like to analyze cancer data? hear whales communicate? match black holes to their jets? or explore the surface of the moon? 

Zooniverse offers a lot of different projects, all with an easy-to-use interface. I highly recommend taking a look at their offerings - zooniverse.org.

Crowdsourcing doesn't have to work towards just processing data for researchers, it has also been used to directly help people. After typhoon Haiyan, organizations used crowdsourcing to determine areas of greatest destruction using volunteers from 82 countries to create and compare before and after maps. These maps also helped volunteers on the ground to get to areas of greatest need. See this article for more details on their efforts. The website fold.it managed to harness gaming as a method of crowdsourcing. In 10 days, gamers solved a mystery concerning the structure of an enzyme that plays a key part in the spread of AIDS which had eluded scientists for years. The Leo Tolstoy Museum was able to proofread 46,800 pages in two weeks. These were then digitized to be used by fans worldwide.

I have worked on a few crowdsourcing projects. They are fun because you get to look at historical documents, the solar system, far-away countries, etc, and everyone's small contribution adds up to a huge advance in knowledge. No matter what you're interested in, I'm sure there's a way you can contribute through crowdsourcing.

Get started by taking a look at the following sites:
zooniverse.org
scistarter.com
birds.cornell.edu/citsci/ 
National Geographic's Fieldscope Project

Focus on Music

Hello everyone.  It is Carl at the keyboard again.  Welcome to another edition of life from the deep recesses of the library on a bitter cold and snowy day.

As most of you already know, the librarians at Ripon College have master’s degrees in Library Science, but some of us also have subject specific master’s degrees as well.  My second  master’s degree happens to be in Church Music.  So today, I’d like to talk a little bit about the music section and some of the interesting resources that Lane Library has available.  I can only touch on a few items, but would be happy to chat further about available resources for your personal research.  So, here we go.

Most people know that at Ripon College we have two libraries that contain musical resources.  Lane Library contains the historical, biographical and instructional texts that you might need for your research.  Rodman Center For The Arts contains the score and sound recording library for listening and practice.

When a person thinks of music research, one of the first background research tools that comes to mind is The New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians.  Ripon College owns two editions.  The 2001 edition is housed at Rodman and the 1980 edition is housed at Lane Library.  Call #:  ML100 .G885 1980.  Each article contains a quality summary of a given topic, plus a bibliography of further sources to consult.

While I find "Groves" fascinating as a musician and scholar, there are many other interesting titles in Lane Library’s music text collection and I will highlight a few of the more interesting ones. 

We own a copy of The Southern Harmony.  This item is a hymnal for worship, but not quite the hymnal you might find when you stroll into one of our local Ripon churches.  When using modern hymnals, it is common to have accompaniments via organ, piano, and/or other instruments.  In contrast, hymns in The Southern Harmony, and other hymnals like it, were sung with no accompaniment.   They also use a form of musical notation known as Shape Notes which was intended to make congregational singing easier.  See the following Wikipedia articles for further information:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Harmony  &  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note  The call # for this book is:  M2117 .S74 1993.

Lane Library also owns a copy of The Liber Usualis.  For those of you who are unfamiliar as to what this book is, it is the Roman Catholic liturgy book used before Vatican II, complete with Gregorian Chants.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council   &  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant   The liturgical chants found in The Liber use an older form of natation (Neumes), notated on a four-line staff.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume   Instruction on how to read and sing these chants are in the book, but if you want to give them a try, be prepared to chant in Latin.  The Call # for this book is:  M2148.1.T8 L42 1952

I recall from childhood hearing the phrase “Music soothes the savage beast.”  Well, I may not have much experience with trying to soothe savage beasts, but I do know that music can evoke an emotional response in people.  Oxford University Press published a book in 2011 that addresses the concept of music and emotion.  It is titled, surprisingly enough, Handbook of Music and Emotion : Theory, research, applications.  Check it out at:  http://catalog.ripon.bywatersolutions.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=131003  The call # for this book is:  ML3830 .H195 2011

So that’s three of the many, varied and interesting books held in the music section of Lane Library.  We have books about many composers and from all eras.  As an aside, while scanning the shelves, I found this title especially interesting:  The Beatles as musicians : Revolver through the Anthology .  http://catalog.ripon.bywatersolutions.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=88204  If you decide to check it out, please let me know if it is a good read.   

In the meantime, Happy Reading, and stay warm.

Carl Ziebell
Lane Library