A Game of Moles: Crowdsourcing the Archives of the Finnish National Library

How can crowdsourcing become a more appealing process? The answer might be: turn it into a game. That is exactly what Microtask, a Finnish company, did to help in the digitization effort of the National Library of Finland. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, the method through which scanned documents are converted from image to searchable text, is prone to errors which can affect accuracy and indexing. The problem is that these mistakes can only be corrected by human hands – a daunting task when faced with over four million pages to sift through.

Microtask and the National Library of Finland collaborated in search of a way to leverage crowdsourcing to correct these mistakes. The search resulted in the creation of two games, Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt.

In the first game the player is asked to find two different words. In the second game the player must correctly enter the text shown in a portion of a scanned document. In the process of playing these games players are constantly checking each other’s work as well as that of the OCR software. Productivity and interest can be vastly increased by repackaging repetitive, potentially unexciting tasks, into a gaming framework.

The Internet will change the way people work. Instead of going to work, work will come to you. We decided to start with something simple, yet meaningful: type a few words to digitize your culture for later generations
Harri Holopainen, Managing Director of Microtask