Mary Flanagan

How can the strengths of current digital tools enhance the environment and the collection of the archive? This project presents novel methods of accessing archival records through the creation of five to ten testable front-end models that foster participatory interactions for furthering research and also bolstering the content of the archive itself. Based on ideas from “crowdsourcing,” where groups of people can solve problems and address tasks quite difficult to do on a person-by-person basis, these models are tested with a larger open source initiative that allows for the deployment of various front- and back-end systems so that a scalable model is available to Open Source developers.