That may well be true, but ‘getting the job done’ isn’t the only aspect of a crowdsourcing project. It can be used to engage an audience more deeply in the collection and give them some investment in it. This can help with overall visibility of the collection on the web (through those people who have engaged sharing what they are doing/seeing etc.), and future use, and be a platform for further projects.

A project like this could also offer a way of experimenting with crowdsourcing in a low risk way. And of course the developer is needed for the visualisation aspect anyway, so the recruitment needs to happen and a wage needs to be paid anyway ...

Whether all this balances out against the economics/efficiency of getting the job done in the cheapest possible way is a judgement that needs to be made, but I don’t think the simple economic argument is the only one in play here.

Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

> On 10 Dec 2015, at 23:42, James Morley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> I agree with Thomas's logic, if not the maths (surely $2,000?)
> 
> I was going to do a few myself but it looks like comments have been disabled on the Flickr images?
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Thomas Krichel [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 10 December 2015 23:17
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Job: Wine Loving Developer  at University of California, Davis
> 
>  [log in to unmask] writes
> 
> 
>> **PROJECT DETAILS**
>> The UC Davis University Library is launching a project to digitize the
>> [Amerine wine label collection](https://www.flickr.com/photos/brantley/sets/72
>> 157655817440104/with/21116552632/)
> 
>  Some look like hard to read.
> 
>> and engage the public to transcribe the information contained on the
>> labels and associated annotations.
> 
>  This may take a long time. I suggest rather than doing that, take
>  somebody in a low-income country who speaks French, say, and who will
>  type all the data in. That way you get consistency in the data.  I
>  live in Siberia, I can find somebody there. Once this data is in a
>  simple text file, you can use in-house staff to attach it to the
>  label images in your systems.
> 
>  Crowdsource sounds cool, but for 4000 label it makes no sense.
>  If the typist gets $10/h, and gets 20 labels done in 1h, we
>  are talking $200. The visit you are planning for your developer
>  will cost that much.
> --
> 
>  Cheers,
> 
>  Thomas Krichel                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                              skype:thomaskrichel