Social and Community Engagement as a Means to Decentralize Institutional Authority and Expanding Knowledge Diversity

As more transcriptions and tags become available in different languages, libraries and cultural heritage institutions better represent the peoples and cultures in their collections, and the patrons and communities they serve. Since the year 2000 online crowdsourcing projects have proliferated and hundreds of cultural heritage institutions have embarked on these projects, many of which explicitly invite people from diverse walks of life to transcribe, annotate or highlight text, speech, typed or handwritten documents. By inviting volunteers in to the process of transcribing, translating and tagging, institutions have the opportunity to co-create new knowledge, and make new discovery pathways through collections. These relationships can ultimately decenter traditional power dynamics and concepts of authority in knowledge systems.This paper describes the need to involve communities in the knowledge creation process and highlight existing projects based on social and community engagement.