Crowd-sourcing has recently come to the attention of the museum community as a potential means of digitising collections in the face of diminishing funding. The Australian Museum in collaboration with the Atlas of Living Australia has developed a Volunteer Portal for transcribing entomology collection labels which is being used to explore how crowd-sourcing can be used to supplement/complement existing digitizing resources. The two biggest questions we want to answer are : 1. Is the quality of the transcribed data sufficient to justify the use of crowd-sourcing, 2. is the crowd-sourcing resource an ongoing one or a fad that will quickly pass and not realize the benefits we hoped it would.

Some non-museum sites such as Old Weather, a site that asks volunteers to transcribe historic ships logs of weather, and the National Library of Australia’s newspaper transcription site, have already proved their worth, with many thousands of words and records transcribed. Our experience with the early days of the ALA Volunteer Portal suggests that crowd-sourcing is definitely a resource that can be tapped into, but how to retain that resource and make best use of it is still to be determined.

Our experience suggests that in developing projects that seek to use crowd-sourcing we need to ensure:

1. we provide incentives for volunteers to be involved, such as:

a. an attractive and easy to use transcription interface

b. clear annunciation of the benefits to the institutions who are seeking the transcription to be done

c. recognition of the efforts of the volunteers

2. that the digitisation outcome and products are not solely reliant on crowd-sourcing but are supplemented by it.

I will discuss the utility and practicality of crowd-sourcing in light of the Australian Museum's own experiences in crowd-sourcing.