Heritage Helpers

To enrich digitized heritage collections, Vitec Memorix has developed the crowdsourcing platform Heritage Helpers. Heritage Helpers brings volunteers and heritage institutions together in a unique way. With the efforts of more than 20,000 volunteers, Heritage Helpers is the crowdsourcing platform for the heritage sector. Would you help us to enrich archive material through Crowdsourcing.

Many archives, museums, universities and research institutes have successfully used the platform and the deployment of volunteers in recent years. More than a hundred unique collections have already been described by the crowd and millions of scans have been provided with metadata. Did you know that more than 1,300 volunteers have written and checked 6 million personal cards within a year? High time to digitize your unique collection and present it to 'our crowd'.

Involvement

On Heritage Helpers, every heritage institution can offer one or more collections to the general public. Together with you we determine the best way to have your source enriched and provided with metadata. We set up the project for you, you write clear and straightforward input instructions and the volunteers do the work. They can do this online, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. During the project, make sure you are available at regular times for questions and feedback. Volunteers can contact you directly through our forum. The interaction on the platform between the heritage institutions, the volunteers and the Heritage Helpers team contributes to the success of the platform.

Quality

The quality of the work delivered is high. In addition to the passion of the participants, we ensure that a scan is entered by at least two volunteers. If there is a difference, it will be submitted to a third party importer and the scan will be corrected or returned to the volunteers to be re-entered. This way the chance of errors is very small.

For more information about Heritage Helpers and current projects, visit: https://heritagehelpers.org/

Heritage Helpers

Many possibilities

Indexing

Personal cards, population registers, marriage certificates, passenger lists, tax registers, militia registers and many other sources of personal data have been made accessible on the platform through our indexing projects. There is a good chance that one of your ancestors was introduced by the volunteers of VeleHanden. Do you also have a source to index? Bring it on, the volunteers of Heritage Helpers love it!

Notarial protocols and photo reports

Describing notarial protocols is a painstaking task. Fortunately, Heritage helpers has found a solution for this. Complete registers are divided into separate deeds by the volunteers. We have the same solution for cutting up photo negatives into separate reports. Heritage Helpers makes large sources clear, this enriches collections and makes them more searchable!

Enrichment through artificial intelligence

Heritage Helpers makes it possible to via Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated transcripts and photo descriptions too improve. Volunteer descriptions are used to train AI.

Photos and options

When we present photos to the crowd, we are sometimes amazed at the stories that emerge. Because the platform has an international reach, we collect the stories from all over the world. There are even international institutions such as UNESCO that have used our English-language platform heritagehelpers.org to describe their unique photo collection.

Old maps

One of the pearls on Heritage Helpers is the georeferencing of old maps. We present an old digitized map next to the current map and ask the crowd to mark points on the map that correspond on both maps. Can you do that three times? Then we can place the cards on top of each other. The past and present almost literally collide here.

Other sources

Sheet music, videos, diaries, posters, Herbaria: for every source there is a solution and an audience. Do you have a unique resource for which there is no solution yet? Then get in touch with one of our specialists. Together we will devise a way to make your collection accessible.