Paper details

Citizen Science and Memory Institutions: Opportunities and Challenges

Author

Milena Dobreva, University of Malta - MAKS faculty - LIAS department, Malta

Documents to download

Full text Foto přednášejícího / Picture Presentation

Abstract

Citizen science is a modern re-introduction of research practices of the past particularly popular in the 19th century when ‘unprofessional’ researchers contributed to scientific projects led by academics. Currently citizen science gained popularity again and it is benefitting from the modern technological eInfrastructures which allow citizens to take part in a new form of scholarly communication and to contribute to research activities. Citizen science is heavily used in the sciences but is still not very popular across libraries, museums and archives which are key stakeholders within the modern Humanities research and digital Humanities. This paper will present some initial findings of the EC-funded Civic Epistemologies project which help to understand better the current attitudes and challenges memory institutions are facing in launching citizen science projects as new ways of engagement with the academics and the general public. It will introduce the concept of citizen science and provide examples from memory institutions delineating it from crowdsourcing; then will address user studies conducted within the Civic Epistemologies project – focus groups held in Malta, Sweden, and Spain which aimed to understand the points of views of memory institutions, policy makers and citizen researchers. Finally the paper will provide some recommendation on launching and implementing citizen science projects within the library context.

Author's professional CV

Assoc. Prof. Milena Dobreva is the Head of the Library Information and Archive Sciences Department, Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences of the University of Malta. Her major research interests are in the areas of digital curation, user studies for digital libraries development including citizen science, and digital humanities. Since graduating M.Sc. (Hons) in Informatics in 1991, Milena Dobreva worked in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences on digitisation, accessibility and preservation of cultural heritage where she earned her PhD degree in Informatics (1999) and served as the founding head of the first Digitisation Centre in Bulgaria (2004). In 2007 she was a guest researcher in HATII of the University of Glasgow contributing to the preservation cluster of the DELOS network of excellence in digital libraries. In 2008–2012 she

worked at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and served as the principal investigator for projects funded by the European Commission, JISC and Scottish Funding Council and as the lead editor of the landmark text “User studies for digital library development” published by Facet, London in 2012. Milena regularly evaluates for the European Commission programmes in the areas of digital libraries, eInfrastructures and research capacity. She is co-directing a series of international summer schools on Access to Digital Archives held annually since 2012 and is currently co-editing a book on this topic.


Organized by

Albertina icome Praha
VŠE

Main Sponsor

Albertina icome Praha & Albertina icome Bratislava

Media Partners

Ikaros
Inflow
ITlib
KNIHOVNA - knihovnická revue
Knihovna plus
Online Searcher