"Crowdsourcing" is a buzzword that means to obtain information by making an appeal to the general public on the Internet. In other words, ask the question publicly and rely on others to answer. It has worked well for this newsletter recently and now the Holocaust Memorial Museum also reports success.
About a thousand times every month, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum receives a request for information about a victim of the Holocaust. The museum houses more than 170 million documents naming more than 17 million people targeted by the Nazis, including Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, political prisoners, and many others. Researchers rely on a combination of historical knowledge and guesswork to pick through the proverbial haystack of microfilm documents. Sometimes it takes weeks to answer an inquiry. Sometimes the question is never solved.
To make the search more efficient, the museum paired with genealogy resource Ancestry.com to launch the World Memory Project, a crowdsourced indexing of the museum’s microfilm documents.
You can learn more in an article by Sarah Kessler on Mashable.com at http://goo.gl/kUu0W
My thanks to Sam Eneman for telling me about this story.
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