The key objective of the Finno-Ugric Digitization Pilot Project is to support a culture of openness and interaction in linguistic research, but also promote the crowdsourcing (or citizen science) as a tool for the participation of the language community in research. This target demands the unlimited availability, accessibility and usability of source material and research results via open repository as well as the participation of the language community in various stages of documentation and application of research results.

In May 2012, the National Library of Finland was awarded a grant for producing the research material and infrastructure required by the Kone Foundation in order to meet the objectives of its Language Programme. In order to meet the prerequisites of the Language Programme, Mari and Mordvinic newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s as well as a selection of Veps and Ingrian books were chosen for digitizing from the collections of the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg.

The material digitised for the Pilot Project was published* through the open repository designed and maintained by the National Library of Finland. This approach allowed the digital material to be available for open use by the public while ensuring access to the academic community to use the language materials in research. In addition, crowdsourcing tools and resources were created for the material in conjunction with its publication.

When modelling the Pilot Project, it was essential to take into consideration the needs of the researchers and to have them participate in the planning and execution of the project from the very beginning. By implementing the feedback iteratively from the researchers, we were capable to transform the requested changes as tools for research that not only supported the work of linguistics, but also encouraged the laymen, or citizen scientists, to face the challenge and work with the crowdsourcing tools for the research’s benefit.

In this presentation, we won’t be discussing only the aspects, developments or achievements of technical infrastructure of our open repositories, but we would like to highlight the process, in which the user groups, the researchers and the laymen, were engaged in a process as an active and communicative group of users and how the contribution of citizen science was made as research’s benefit.

*due to the copyrights, the service will be available for the public as of spring 2013 onwards.

This presentation is based on work co-authored by Leena Saarinen.