Beyond Collections

Two members of our team attended the Beyond Collections conference in Oxford yesterday. Some successful projects were discussed there giving us some pointers and ideas for WikiVet. Even though the WikiVet project is a bit different because we cannot source from the general public as such but only from within the veterinary profession, it was still very useful to see how others succeeded in their tasks.

I found it particularly useful to see that the word 'crowdsourcing' may not be the best to use as I have always struggled with what exactly it means. It was good to see that people found that providing easy ways for people to contribute increased their volunteer input. We have tried various easy editors for our wiki but so far there were too may glitches to keep that going. It is definitely worth pursuing it further though.

The ethics of using volunteer input is also something to keep in mind and the fact that some projects found that 'user awards' also increased the volunteer motivation.

And finally, I was really encouraged by the idea of providing audio versions of content. One of our team has suggested that very recently too and the fact that others found it very useful for their projects was motivating to pursue the idea further.