May 1, 2012

All Souls Church, Langham Place in London, England, has appealed through Social Media and its website for volunteers to help ‘tag' 3,600 free sermons and talks.

More than 12 years ago the All Souls church council decided to make its entire archive free, even though income from the sales of tapes and CDs paid for someone's annual wage. They believed the talks should be a resource for the global church.

There are now more than 3,000 talks going back to the 1960s when John Stott was still Rector. The archive is constantly being added to with all Sunday and midweek talks are available as routine on the website as well as via podcast.

However, a lack of ‘tags' – words added to files to allow visitors to search the archive – means specific sermons are hard for visitors to find.

The church believes that crowdsourcing is the answer: "Currently, if you know the Bible passage, the preacher or even the sermon's title, it is relatively straightforward to find what you want," a church staff member explains on their website. "But what if you want a sermon on a particular topic? This is where tagging comes in.

"We have over 3,600 sermons and talks in the archive. If we just relied on our web team, it would take months and months. However, if we can harness the interest and support of our many subscribers through crowdsourcing, it would take a matter of only a few weeks.

"If 300 people tag 10 sermons each, in one month, we could get the whole lot done!" Of course 3000+ people doing just one sermon each would get the job done even faster...

If you are interested in helping please visit: http://www.allsouls.org/Articles/309547/All/Resourcing/Sermons/Sermon.aspx.

Anglican Communion News Service