Angry Birds for the Thinking Person

The National Library of Finland has come up with some creative ideas to engage users in fixing mistakes in its digitized archives.

"We have millions and millions of pages of historically and culturally valuable magazines, newspapers and journals online. The challenge is that the optical character recognition often contains errors and omissions, which hamper for example searches," says Kai Ekholm, Director of the National Library of Finland. "Manual correction is needed to weed out these mistakes so that the texts become machine readable, enabling scholars and archivists to search the material for the information they need."

The library has created games for users to play, which, as they are played, will fix mistakes in the digitized archives. In Mole Hunt, users are shown two different words and must determine if they are actually the same word. In Mole Bridge, users have to spell correctly words which appear on their screen. Both these games correct mistakes brought into the digitized material through optical character recognition. Read more about it (and see images of the games) on ReadWriteWeb.

(Seen first on Librarian.net)