Abstract
Utilizing crowdsourcing to make an organization's cultural heritage material more accessible can be a cumbersome and resource-intensive process. Without a digitization workflow designed to facilitate the use of image sets in multiple ways on a variety of platforms, large-scale crowdsourcing would be out of reach for the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). However, such a workflow can also be a natural extension of regular operations. SIA's incorporation of crowdsourcing preparation into its normal digital preservation and access operations demonstrates how an organization can achieve higher levels of audience engagement and acquire high-quality enriched data while avoiding heavy impacts to existing staff resources. This brief article outlines digitization workflows, material selection, and the underpinning principles and practices that the SIA employs and offers these as one possibility for organizations to consider before embarking on such a project.
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