Motivating Users to Build Heritage Collections Using Games on Social Networks

Efforts to motivate user participation and contribution towards digital libraries, such as heritage collections, are often unsuccessful, resulting in empty or underutilized collections. These collections have the potential to improve heritage preservation and education. However, without growth, they are of little use to society. Using a Facebook application, different techniques were compared for motivating user participation and contribution of content towards a heritage collection. It was found that direct competition outperformed a badge system and successfully motivated users to contribute. These results are particularly interesting since, in a developing country, such as where this research was carried out, community and collaboration are usually valued and favoured over competition.