You can now participate in BNE collaborative platform

A couple of weeks ago, the Spanish National Library (BNE) presented its collaborative work platform, comunidad.bne.es, developed together with Red.es, in an event that brought together dozens of collaborators interested in our cultural heritage.

Since then, almost 200 people have participated in the proposed projects, with 2,000 completed tasks, which shows the success of the initiative. However, they are still looking for collaborators who want to help enrich the Library data, making them more accessible and easy to reuse.

Any citizen can collaborate, either anonymously or by registering on the platform, which allows participating in the rankings and statistics of the portal.

The projects open to citizen participation are structured around 5 areas: identification and transcription, georeferencing, audio transcription, marking and labeling, and data enrichment. As an example and starting point, 7 projects have been proposed to show the available functionalities, using different types of collections:

• Jean Laurent was here - and that is how he saw us -. The collaborators will help to place on the current map the places that appear in the images of Jean Laurent. French by birth, Jean Laurent, lived a great part of his life in our country and immortalized with his camera some of the most convulsive moments of our history: the reign of Isabel II, the democratic Sexenio with the reign of Amadeo de Saboya, the I Spanish Republic and the Bourbon Restoration with the arrival of Alfonso XII.
• Unidentified. The BNE has selected a series of photographs of the Civil War whit unidentified characters. Knowing who these, often anonymous, people were would be practically impossible without citizens help, who can recognize a relative or acquaintance in the images. The BNE gives the opportunity to name these characters and tell their story.
• What does it sound like? The objective of this project is to obtain as much information as possible about musical groups from the BNE catalog. To do this, people who want to collaborate must answer a series of questions about the different bands, such as what the group musical genre is, where they come from or if the group is still active.
• Candilejas. This project seeks to identify actors, actresses and people from the theater (pointers, orchestra and stage directors, musicians...) through a series of nineteenth-century theater posters. The collaborators will help transcribing the names that appear in the images, relating them with certain companies and represented works, which will allow us to get an idea of ​​the Spanish theater panorama of two centuries ago.
• A dictionary, a Swedish diplomat and ninetheenth-century Spain. In the 19th century Gustaf Daniel Lorich, a Swedish diplomat expert in numismatics who lived in Spain, wrote a dictionary called Graphic description of ancient Spain and its correspondence with modern Spain. This manuscript document, whitout known printed version, collects place names and descriptions of the locations that hevisited or studied during his work. The BNE looks for collaborators that help transcribe it to know its correspondence with our current environment.
• Who is who? This project consists of transcribing information about the members of the 1869Constituent Assembly, portrayed in one of the library albums. Collaborators can see various portraits and indicate the character name, position and location.
• To my distinguished friend. Many of the collections guarded by the BNE have handwritten dedications between their pages and images, documents of great value that need to be transcribed to facilitate their conservation and identification.

In addition, the BNE developed a sample project to illustrate the result of this kind of projects: Clifford´s Madrid, where is identified the different places of Madrid that appeared in a series of images taken by Charles Clifford, contemporary of Jean Laurent. The result of the project was the generation of new data (in JSON, CSV and XMLformat), a visualization and a timeline.

These projects are just a sample of the potential of citizen collaboration. During the next weeks and months, the BNE will suggest new proposals for collaborative enrichment and increase the platform's functionalities. In addition, any citizen could suggest new ideas, just sending an email to bnelab@bne.es.

Citizens possess a great knowledge, result of our learning, but also of our daily experiences, a knowledge that sometimes is not easy to acquire otherwise. Therefore, our collaboration is essential to enrich our cultural heritage, while making it more accessible and reusable.