Temporal Motivations of Volunteers to Participate in Cultural Crowdsourcing Work

Crowdsourcing (CS) by cultural and heritage institutions engage volunteers in online projects without monetary compensation. Uncertainty concerning online volunteer motivation has led to a growing body of academic research. This study contributes to that debate, by extending focus to CS volunteer work in nonprofit cultural institutions where no monetary benefit is offered to volunteers. This study examines motivations of high performing volunteers in a newspaper digitisation CS project, initiated by the National Library of Australia. Volunteers are motivated by personal, collective, and external factors, and these motivations change over time. Volunteers initially show intrinsic motivations, though both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations play a critical role in their continued participation. Volunteer contributions range from data shaping (e.g., correcting digitised optical character recognition data) to knowledge shaping (e.g., shaping historical data through tagging and commenting, but also through dev...