Communities & Crowds: Expanding Volunteer Programs Across Physical and Digital Spaces for Cultural Institutions

“社区与人群”项目为画廊、图书馆、档案馆和博物馆（GLAM）机构提供了一种新的模式，通过面对面和在线的方式，与观众进行更深入的接触。该项目的最终目标是打破障碍，并吸引新的志愿者社区与机构结构合作，询问和展示遗产收藏。通过在整个项目中结合参与性和公民科学的方法，这个实验项目的结果将对博物馆的实践和数字参与的概念产生影响。在英国和美国的文化遗产组织中，志愿者是机构基础设施的重要组成部分。志愿劳动无处不在，从艺术博物馆到天文馆都有。在文化组织中，志愿者与游客互动，处理藏品，提供行政支持，以及不同机构的无数其他任务。志愿者帮助确保机构顺利运作，即使预算限制无法雇用额外的工作人员。与此同时，志愿者个人也从与博物馆的合作中受益，要么是对藏品的内容感兴趣，要么是对社区的“回馈”感，要么是社会化的机会，要么是面向职业的学习和经验积累。随着文化机构越来越多地利用数字技术吸引观众，这些空间也出现了对志愿者的需求。然而，数字志愿者机会往往侧重于志愿者作为受众，而不是作为机构团队的重要组成部分。吸引数字志愿者到文物机构工作的一个例子是通过在线众包项目。众包是一种数字化参与形式，它邀请志愿者通过执行有意义的任务来参与机构收藏。它通常被视为一种鼓励公众参与遗产材料的方式，同时完成必要的机构数据处理任务，从而使更广泛的受众可以搜索和发现藏品。然而，大多数众包项目都是“离线”创建的，只有在项目的目标和研究问题完全形成后，才与在线志愿者分享。通过这种方式，数字志愿者被赋予了“用户”或“观众”的角色，而不是共同创造者或合作者。在“社区与人群”项目中，我们旨在重新审视志愿者在物理和数字领域的角色，最终目标是打破等级障碍，并为教学文化机构提供路线图，将在线参与作为与机构工作人员合作的数字和真人志愿者互动的模式。特别是，我们将重点关注如何通过在线众包的过程来实现这种做法，使用Zooniverse平台作为案例研究。这项合作将包括国家科学和媒体博物馆（英国布拉德福德）的研究人员、策展人、教育和志愿者团队，阿德勒天文馆（芝加哥，伊利诺伊州）和牛津大学（英国牛津）的Zooniverse团队，以及世界各地的在线志愿者。

The 'Communities & Crowds' project offers a new model for Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) institutions to engage more deeply with their audiences through their collections, both in-person and online. The goal of the project is ultimately to break down barriers, and engage new volunteer communities to interrogate and make visible heritage collections in collaboration with institutional structures. By combining participatory and citizen science methodologies throughout this project, the outcomes of this experimental program will have impact for both museum practice and concepts of digital-enabled participation.In cultural heritage organizations across the UK and US, volunteers are a critical part of institutional infrastructure. Volunteer labor is ubiquitous, spanning disciplines from art museums to planetaria. Within cultural organizations, volunteers interact with visitors, work with collections, and provide administrative support, among myriad other tasks that vary across institutions. Volunteers help to ensure that institutions run smoothly, even when budget limitations prevent the hiring of additional staff. At the same time, volunteers personally benefit from their association with museums, either due to interest in the content of collections, a feeling of 'giving back' to one's community, opportunities for socialization, or career-oriented learning and experience-building. As cultural institutions increasingly make use of digital technology to engage audiences, the need for volunteers has arisen in those spaces as well. However, digital volunteer opportunities often focus on volunteers as audiences, rather than as an essential part of the institutional team. One example of attracting digital volunteers to heritage institutions is through online crowdsourcing projects. Crowdsourcing is a form of digitally-enabled participation which invites volunteers to engage with institutional collections by performing meaningful tasks. It is often viewed as a way to simultaneously encourage public engagement with heritage materials, while completing essential institutional data processing tasks that can result in making collections searchable and discoverable by a wider range of audiences. However, most crowdsourcing projects are created 'offline' and only shared with online volunteers once the project's aims and research questions are fully formed. In this way, digital volunteers are assigned the role of 'users' or 'audience', rather than as co-creators or collaborators.In the 'Communities & Crowds' project we aim to re-examine the role of the volunteer in the physical and digital realms, with the ultimate goal of breaking down hierarchical barriers and providing a roadmap for teaching cultural institutions to use online engagement as a model for interacting with both digital and in-person volunteers as collaborators with institutional staff. In particular, we will focus on how this practice can be realized through the process of online crowdsourcing, using the Zooniverse platform as a case study. This collaborative effort will include researchers, curators, educational and volunteer teams at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK), the Zooniverse teams at the Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL) and Oxford University (Oxford, UK), and online volunteers around the world.