Page 77 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

076 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

that must be considered in project planning and design. Scientists and research teams often
consider citizen science projects as a quick way to get public feedback and solutions, and this
“implemental thinking” prevents scientists and research teams from devoting much of their energy
to volunteer motivation and training. It turns out, however, that citizen science projects that are
eager for quick results do not yield truly high-quality and valuable results. In the process of digital
humanities citizen science projects, it is an exploration-worthy research question to figure out how
to attract a large number of citizens to participate and conduct effective basic training to them, in
order to ensure that the volunteers are motivated and able to complete the task. Within the issue,
a series of empirical studies are needed for the analysis of the motivation of public participation,
the countermeasures of “cold start”, and the design of player motivation based on gamification
elements. Accordingly, citizen science greatly expands the coverage and approaches of science
popularization while promoting scientific innovation and open innovation. Citizen science
projects can be viewed as an informal education project (Bonney et al., 2009; Silvertown, 2009).
Therefore, at the beginning of the citizen science project, education targets must be placed in a
fairly vital position to consider. To enable participants to better complete citizen science projects,
the author suggests introducing the action research paradigm and conducting embedded training
to the volunteers on their scientific literacy, information literacy and media literacy in the digital
humanities citizen science projects.

5 Conclusion

The exploration of citizen science projects is an interdisciplinary research domain. Both natural
science research and humanities and social science research can leverage citizen science projects
to practice the concept of scientific crowdsourcing. Citizen science projects are of great practical
significance to individuals, organizations and society. For individuals, citizen science projects
will give participants different forms and levels of training and guidance, so as to enhance the
initiative of individuals to participate in science and improve citizens’ scientific literacy and
information literacy. For organizations, this paper proposes the idea of “institutional view”, and
advocates relevant organizations to assist research teams in carrying out and promoting public
scientific projects and take project management responsibilities, such as business management,
data management and process management. For the society, the idea of scientific research, “What
comes from the people should absolutely benefit the people”, is fully reflected in the exploration of
citizen science projects. Citizen science has the potential to create great social value in terms of the
size of participants, the speed and effectiveness of task execution, accuracy and influence. From
the perspective of the Library and Information Science, investigation on scientific crowdsourcing
model and citizen science help to optimize the organization, aggregation, development and
utilization of online information resources, and enrich the theoretical and practical exploration of
knowledge innovation and service innovation under the big data environment.