The Concept of Crowdsourcing in Musical Instrument Documentation: Cataloguing an Indian Musical Instrument Collection in Greece
The Concept of Crowdsourcing in Musical Instrument Documentation: Cataloguing an Indian Musical Instrument Collection in Greece

Summary/Abstract: Documentation is an essential basis for all museum functions including the protection, conservation, study, and exhibition of museum collections. The way a cataloguing system is designed has a major impact on the work of museum professionals, as well as on the museum audience groups. Therefore, if the cataloguing fields were designed to meet the needs and desires of these people, they would be of far greater use to museums. To achieve this, the concept of crowdsourcing could be useful, so that the museum can record people’s needs and desires and then incorporate them into the documentation system. This idea was applied to the documentation of Konstantinos Kalaitzi’s collection of Indian musical instruments. The cataloguing fields were first designed according to the relevant bibliography. A survey was then conducted to identify the desires and needs of the museum audience groups and the museum professionals, and the results were incorporated into the cataloguing fields. The above methodology resulted in the creation of a detailed cataloguing system, that will become a challenging but exciting field of work for scholars from different disciplines and a valuable source of information for future generations. The whole process is presented in this paper so that it can be used by other museum professionals.

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