Great war stories told by the people – crowdsourced cultural heritage in digital museums

Abstract

The increasing interest in the centenary of the Great War 1914–1918 motivates the development of a digital library to capture and access valuable cultural heritage artefacts that would otherwise be lost. We will present a prototype to make available the story of the First World War in the local context of a British town, as told by the people today. The core of our prototype is crowdsourced ingest. To this end we apply latest insights from information interaction and access to foster user engagement. Open standards like CIDOC/CRM facilitate the external provision of our data and the integration of external resources. In the demo we will present our current Great War Stories prototype and how researchers from the humanities as well as digital libraries researchers will be able to benefit from and contribute to the project.