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Category: Conference Notes

Herding the Fuzzy Bits: What do you do after Crowdsourcing?

So you’re a library or museum and you’ve been crowdsourcing and now you’ve collected lots of fantastic data. What do you do with it?

Or maybe you’ve been thinking about crowdsourcing but you’re not sure how you would integrate what you get with the data you already have.

The truth is that crowdsourcing often yields lots of fuzzy data and fuzzy solutions for reintegration with existing content. It can be challenging to figure out how to herd all of that fuzziness together in a useful way for reuse in your own project, library, or database.

Pop-Up-O-Philes in Philly

The Movable Book Society 10th Biennial Conference. Philadelphia, Sept 18-20, 2014

Left: Elizabeth Broman, Cooper-Hewitt Librarian and Pop-up artist Sam Ita. Right: Pop-up artist Colette Fu and Stephen Van Dyk, Cooper-Hewitt Branch Librarian
Left: Elizabeth Broman, Cooper-Hewitt Librarian and Pop-up artist Sam Ita. Right: Pop-up artist Colette Fu and Stephen Van Dyk, Cooper-Hewitt Branch Librarian.

 

This was my very first pop-up book conference and I came away absolutely charged up, inspired and quite proud of our pop-up book collection here at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum Library. I’ve been a member of the Movable Book Society for a number of years, and add the quarterly newsletter, Movable Stationery, to our serial collection, which has been fully digitized and available online. It is indexed on the Movable Book Society website.

Code4Lib Conference in Raleigh

"Inside the Personal Computer"
“Inside the Personal Computer”

Code4Lib is many things. It is an IRC Channel, a hashtag on twitter, and of course an annual conference. The group is comprised of programmers, libraries and librarians, designers, curators, and many other types of people who work to support their libraries, archives, and museums (more info on what Code4Lib is all about). The annual conference of the meeting of the minds (as I like to call it) has been happening once a year since 2006. The conference was held in Raleigh, NC this year and was from March 24-27. As one of the resident computer nerds here at the Smithsonian Libraries, I was fortunate enough to be chosen by the powers that be to attend the conference this year and represent the Libraries.