Computers may have defeated humans in chess and arithmetic, but there are many areas where the human mind still excels such as visual cognition and language processing (Comm. of ACM, Vol 52, No 3, March 2009). If one mind is good, it has been argued that several minds are likely to be superior in certain tasks than individuals and even experts. This project aims to leverage the wisdom of the crowds (von Ahn, 2008) to collaboratively tag historical newspaper articles in the holdings of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Patrons and scholars will be encouraged to generate custom tags for articles they read and use often; these will be integrated into a meta-data library and evaluated for their contribution to improving retrieval performance. The text in the newspaper articles along with user-generated tags will be subjected to statistical analysis and machine learning for automatic categorization
