For Immediate Release
Tiltfactor is proud to announce a new collaboration with the British Library! To celebrate, Tiltfactor’s Metadata Games project will launch the new tagging game Ships Tag as part of a tag event called May Day! May Day! starting midnight on May 1st.
The collaboration between the British Library and Tiltfactor presents an innovative way for public users to explore and tag the British Library’ collection of over a million public domain images which were posted onto Flickr Commons in December 2013. By playing Ships Tag, players produce in-game tags which directly contribute to the Library’s content knowledge. This not only helps the British Library augment its metadata, but it also greatly expands the collection’s accessibility for public research, reuse, and repurposing. The entire collection, whose subjects range from intricate maps, geological diagrams, charts, illustrations, landscapes and more, is an amazing opportunity for players to be a part of the process of organizing this vast online collection.
Nora McGregor, Digital Curator at the British Library said “As an institution committed to sparking creativity, the British Library is always looking for ways in which to support the innovative use of our digital collections, particularly through initiatives like the Flickr Commons upload and other associated projects run by the BL Labs team. This project with Metadata Games offers a unique opportunity to both enable better discovery of these wonderful images, while also helping to inform our own processes for enhancing metadata through crowdsourcing in future.”
Ships Tag is the first in a series of three new tagging games, each of which integrates a select subset of images from the British Library’s digital collections. “We are excited for this chance to work with the The British Library,” says Sukie Punjasthitkul, project manager of the Metadata Games project. “Through these three Metadata Games, we look forward to furthering research in player motivation and novel uses of the British Library’s incredible collections.”
About The British Library
The British Library (http://www.bl.uk) is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s greatest research libraries. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library’s collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Up to 10 million people visit the British Library website – www.bl.uk – every year where they can view up to 4 million digitised collection items and over 40 million pages.
About Metadata Games
Metadata Games (http://www.metadatagames.org) is a free and open source digital gaming platform developed by Tiltfactor Laboratories (https://tiltfactor.org) at Dartmouth College, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The suite of games enables archivists to gather and analyze information for digital media archives in novel and exciting ways, and provides social science and information science researchers a novel tool with which to investigate crowdsourcing and human computation behaviors and outcomes. Institutions and researchers interested in the project and datasets are encouraged to contact Tiltfactor.
About Tiltfactor
Tiltfactor Laboratory (https://tiltfactor.org) is a design studio dedicated to understanding how games can be used to generate new knowledge. Tiltfactor designs, studies, and launches games, across a variety of platforms, that use core psychological principles and strategies to promote learning and impact players’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Founded and led by Dr. Mary Flanagan, Tiltfactor uses its unique design methodology, Critical Play, to incorporate fundamental human values and psychological principles to promote pro-social values such as cooperation, perspective taking, empathy, and civic engagement.
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Metadata Games
Tiltfactor
246 Black Family Visual Arts Center
HB 6194 Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755 USA
+1-603-646-1007
metadata@tiltfactor.org
@tiltfactor
@criticalplay
#metadatagames