Next on stage is Niall Anderson from the British Library, talking about public participation in mass digitisation, and “why we think that’s a good idea”.
A 2008 Conference of European Libraries survey estimated that that there were now some 8 million digitised text-based items in existence, proof that we live in an era of effective mass digitisation. However, British Library research has suggested that some 20% of all digital text produced is effectively unreadable due to poor capture, OCR deficiencies, and difficulties native to the source material. If the point of mass digitisation is to enable wider public use of previously inaccessible material, then this shortfall in readable text must be addressed. Niall outlines the history and future of collaborative correction in mass digitisation by demonstrating IMPACT’s CONCERT tool, which will make more digital documents available through crowdsourcing and structured correction of text.