Scottish Political Archive crowdsourcing

Background information: In 2020 the Scottish Political Archive joined forces with (SPA) MicroPasts to engage a broad community in sharing their knowledge and expertise. Beginning with our political leaflet collection, we asked participants to describe the information represented on an image in order to create better metadata for these items on our catalogue. After the successful completion of this project, we moved on to describing our Independent Referendum 2014 photographic collection.

Project details: Volunteers will use the Micropasts platform to log keywords for images from our photographic archive to improve searchability of the collection.

Location: The project is carried out online with volunteers working on the MicroPasts website.

Skills gained: Working on MicroPasts will provide volunteers with practical experience of working with archive material and crowdsourcing platforms. Volunteers will gain experience of indexing, a valuable skill for those with an interest in working in archives and libraries.

Contact: scottishpoliticalarchive@stir.ac.uk