showed that the Wikisource version of a book appeared higher than the same item on the Library’s Digital Gallery, with the Library’s record sometimes not even appearing on the first page of Google results.
The National Library of Scotland’s experiments with Wikisource have shown that the platform is not necessarily the best medium to use if an organization is solely interested in improving the quality of its transcriptions through OCR, as it is a slow process, requires significant manual input, dialog and engagement with the Wikimedia community and agreement on standards. For the National Library of Scotland, however, the benefits of running this project have far outweighed these issues, and the improved transcriptions the Library has received have been more of a side benefit rather than the main reason for engaging with Wikisource. The project has brought a lot of positives to the Library, including raising the awareness off Wikimedia platforms among staff, kick-starting an internal Community of Interest, and building relations with the wider Wikimedia community, all of which should make activity in this area a more sustainable element of the Library’s work in the future. This initiative has developed staff skills and empowered them to grow in new areas during a difficult and traumatic time in their working lives, it has helped to bring an important digitized collection to a wider public audience, and it has created a workflow that will allow work to ramp up again in the event of future crises and lockdowns. Aside from anything else, the Library’s Wikisource transcription project has given a glimpse of what can be achieved when considerable staff resources are committed to an open-knowledge project.
References
Alex, B., Grover, C., Klein, E., & Tobin, R. (2012). Digitised historical text: Does it have to be mediOCRe? In Proceedings of KONVENS 2012 (pp. 401–9). https://www.oegai.at/konvens2012/proceedings/59_alex12w/.
Europeana Pro. (2019, July 31). Issue 13: OCR. https://pro.europeana.eu/page/issue-13-ocr.
Hagan, A. (2016, March 4). Scottish chapbooks now online! National Library of Scotland Blog. https://blog.nls.uk/scottish-chapbooks-now-online/.
