For the sake of clarity, and in keeping with near-universal proliferation of metadata and its use in the digital age, this paper adopts a broad definition of “cataloging”. This study refers to this creation as the revolutionary cataloging interface: capable of being taught and learned to a workable degree during an unsupervised interactive 10–15 minute tutorial, requiring little or no previous cataloging experience, yet capable of producing robust and rich metadata with an impressive level of automated quality control. Of particular interest here is an intrinsic by-product of these attempts to efficiently harvest accurate and reliable metadata from the crowd.
Whether a natural extension of citizen science into library science, a result of the library world’s growing appreciation and use of Web 2.0 developments, a profession’s experimental response to the challenge of hidden collections, or an amalgamation of all three, what is clear is that the crowdsourced creation of descriptive metadata is a growing and important element of twenty-first-century library science. This developing phenomenon is worthy of research, not only to investigate its origins, but also to track its development and note potential benefits for the present and future. The current decade has witnessed a growing trend towards the utilization of crowdsourced strategies when attempting to describe library resources.
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