Preservation and Ethical Re-Use of Crowdsourced Citizen Scholarship

Cultural repositories are increasingly tapping into the collective expertise of an interested public via crowdsourcing to improve the intellectual accessibility of handwritten sources and nourish their archival records . However, few are discussing the subsequent preservation and ethical re-use of these citizen contributions in the archival record and scholarship. We do not consider citizen contributors as simply a “sourced crowd;” they are often experts in the subject matter represented in these primary sources, and their collective scholarship (i.e. transcriptions,translations, indexes) is worthy of preservation. Our goal is to configure workflows for the preservation of these collectively-produced resources. We believe that every individual who contributes to the interpretation and understanding of our collections should be given credit for their efforts in the archival record and in scholarship. Based on ethical and practical considerations, our aim is to develop use statements and citation guides for scholars re-using citizen contributions.