Social indexing in the context of citizen science

Application in photographic documents

Abstract

Citizen Science is one of the eight objectives defined within the European Commission's Open Science policies. It is based on collaboration between scientists, researchers and institutions with the public in the scientific investigation process. Libraries, archives and museums can be active partners in the scope of Citizen Science, supporting “non-professional” researchers in the performance of their work, through the identification and description of documents, including photographs. Social indexing refers to the free and personal tagging of information and web resources in an open and shared environment. Platforms that allow social indexing of photographs are used for dissemination, but also as aggregators of contributions from the general public. The main goal is to frame the social indexing of photographs from public and private institutions within the concept of Citizen Science to assess how citizen participation provides beneficial results to institutions. The methodology is based on a selective bibliographic research and on the content analysis of collected texts. The present study identifies advantages for institutions in resorting to Citizen Science activities, namely the promotion of practices of social indexing of photographs through web platforms, as a way of implementing a more exhaustive description and indexing of their collections.