The Human Side of Digitized Knowledge: Community Curation of the Ethno-ornithology World Archive

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The Ethno-ornithology World Archive (EWA) is an internet-based, public facing archive of global cultural knowledge relating to birds. EWA was initiated with financial support from an AHRC Digital Transformations in Community Research Co-Production grant with the aim of connecting 'local' communities with communities of conservation practitioners and social and biological researchers through a shared concern for the conservation of birds and cultural and linguistic diversity. To this end, the Project Partnership with BirdLife International is crucial to the design and establishment of EWA, not least because BirdLife's Local Empowerment Programme (LEP), based around 2,700 Important Bird Areas (IBAs) and associated grassroots Local Conservation Groups (LCGs) in more than 100 countries, was identified as the core user community for EWA.Despite the continuing importance of BirdLife International in the EWA Partnership, our work in developing EWA, especially through new contacts made through conferences of the Society of Ethnobiology (SoE) and International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE) and linguists at SOAS etc. has convinced us of the need to engage with the many linguistically and culturally distinct communities that currently lie outside BirdLife's LEP (because they are not associated with an IBA), but whose engagement with EWA would be mutually beneficial. Through contacts made through the EWA project, these communities include Indigenous people across five continents. They also include urban groups in the UK and elsewhere who are often marginalised and disconnected from, and lack access to, nature. To enable the engagement with this extended community EWA needs to develop a trustworthy, robust, flexible, and responsive network of Curators worldwide. These Curators will be the key to maintaining EWA's ability to respond to diverse community needs and responsible archival strategies as this global user community grows. They will provide a knowledgeable human interface where required between EWA and their contributing communities. The proposed project aims, therefore, to develop a Curator Network for EWA to extend the reach of this archive resource to diverse communities and audiences not currently accessible through BirdLife's LEP.EWA's scope is global, with potential outreach to all language groups; and while its value as a research tool is considerable, public and community engagement are essential to EWA's success because: a) it is an archive of publicly submitted (crowd-sourced) information that is being shared with, not donated to, a larger community through EWA; b) it aims to affirm and support local efforts in nature conservation; and c) crowd-funding will be important to maintain the archive in the long term. These concerns require the strongest ethical principles to be embodied within the modus operandi of EWA and its Curator Network to allow for varied terms of permission to submit information and to allow individuals or communities to restrict access to material that they deem to be secret or sensitive. Critically, EWA must be responsive to diverse cultural sensibilities and allow for differing degrees of community engagement consistent with individual and/or community wishes, recognising that ultimately it is their right to choose whether to share their knowledge with a wider audience.The principal outcomes of the project will be 1) a seed network of at least 30 volunteer curators, trusted by their local communities, with expertise in global and/or local bird taxonomy, local languages, ethnobiology, local traditions and trained in the ethical use of EWA; 2) a document outlining curation management guidelines and strategy, available in several languages; 3) a digitized and translated library of Curator training materials, also multilingual; 4) an effective and scalable database for efficient Curator management; 5) research publications; and 6) the first Curator Workshop at an international conference.