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Paper short abstract:

This paper will introduce a project by the Academic Repository Network (Re*poN) to create a crowdsourcing system accompanied by hybrid events and discuss how digitization and crowdsourcing can help local museums collect and interpret information on their collections of everyday objects.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss how digitization and crowdsourcing can help local museums collect and interpret information on their collections of everyday objects. Throughout Japan, everyday objects have been collected and preserved as materials with which we can learn the history and culture of the regions. However, many local museums are poor in detailed records of these objects in their catalogs; for example, some objects lack essential information on how and for what they were used or who made, used, and donated them and when. Such undescribed collections cannot be utilized in museum exhibitions or other educational or scholarly activities but just be abandoned.

To solve this problem, the Academic Repository Network (Re*poN) started a project to create a crowdsourcing system to gather information on everyday objects in cooperation with Shibetsu City Museum in Hokkaido. In early October 2022, we held a first hybrid meeting in the city, aiming to know how effectively we can collect information on these objects when informants gather from inside and outside the region in person and virtually. The offline participants were local museum staff, researchers (from the fields of informatics, museology, or ethnography), and local senior citizens who may know about these old everyday objects, while museum professionals and researchers from outside the city also joined online. In the meeting, we take a look at undescribed everyday objects from the museum collections one by one. At the same time, participants discussed and recorded on google forms what these objects are and when, where, and how these objects were made and used, sharing any related information from their own experience, the internet, or any other sources.

Through the meeting, we learned the effectiveness of combining online and offline to interact with various informants from inside and outside the region to collect information on everyday objects. The digitization of collections realized communication beyond the region and made undescribed collections recognizable as cultural resources. We will develop an online crowdsourcing system with hybrid meetings to expand the community to collect and share information on local everyday objects.