Alexander SCHATEK
(Icarus, Vienna, Austria)

Keywords: Citzen Scientists, Crowd Sourcing, Private Collections, Local Archives

Abstract:
How to make private, even small collections public? The Topothekque´s concept has put it into action! By activating those, who are the interactors between citizens and historic work they can rise the historic material and information. Having the local mindset – other than far away institutions – they emphazise the local information such as relocating places on the maps, naming persons on old photographs, recalling and such saving local stories tending to be forgotten for the next generations. In the villages there rise regular meetings with older inhabitants to enrich the Topotheques both with data and wirth new meta data as well. Based on local units the digital archives aggregate the local photographs and remembrance in due collaboration with the inhabitants. Having the local governments as publisher, the archives play the role of official digital historic instituions of a village or town. Data is described by keywords that can be tagged in the pictures, by date and by location on the map. There the point of view plus the angle of view can be shown (3 points) . To rise the level of digitization and annotations the topothequers are invited to workshops that are held in cooperation with NÖLA in Lower Austria. The network of Topotheques now also grows in Upper Austria an within an EU project (co:op – Cooperation – Opportunities) in 7 additional european contries. For this reason the surface is translated and easily translatable into furhter languages. Already there are several languages available, such as hungarian, finnish, swedish, italian, croatian, cech, spanish, english. The next step will be realizing the option to search one key word not only in one Topotheque but in all or in chosen Topothekes.

Relevance conference: It´s happening – over 900 Citizen Scientists do it already having collected more than 300.000 items searchable in about 200 Topotheques.
Relevance session: It´s happening – over 900 Citizen Scientists do it already having collected more than 300.000 items searchable in about 200 Topotheques.
Innovation: Easy to use Topotheques for even older people to work in sets up local digital collections – free of cost by Citizen Scientists.
References:
• www.prater.topothek.at
• www.topothek.at