The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) was recently awarded a $449,641 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to research and test new means of using crowdsourcing and gaming to support the enrichment of some 40 million documents from the BHL. We are excited to announce that as part of this grant, Tiltfactor has been selected by BHL consortium member, the Missouri Botanical Garden, as the designer to develop games to aid in the verification of transcribed field notes and other documents in BHL’s vast collection!
This partnership allows us to continue our research into game crowdsourcing for humanities applications, the focus of our on-going work with the Metadata Games project. We aim to use our experience from Metadata Games to assist the BHL in expanding access to its collections through play. According to Tiltfactor founder and director Mary Flanagan, “The ‘Purposeful Gaming and BHL’ initiative extends our work with Metadata Games creation to bring in the public to meaningfully participate in our nation’s robust archives…Games can be harnessed to provide fun experiences that also improve transcription and make bioheritage accessible to many more people. Tiltfactor is thrilled to work with BHL and their partners on an endeavor with such a high social return.”
Our two teams have begun working collaboratively, and we expect the official release of the games in Summer 2015.