Consultation of manuscripts online: a qualitative study of three potential user categories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Europeana Regia is a project to digitise manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, supported by the European Commission and involving five European libraries. During the project, a qualitative study was conducted to determine and rank the expectations and needs of the current and potential users of medieval manuscripts online. Focus groups were organised in three of the project’s partner libraries. Each focus group was dedicated to one of the user categories primarily targeted in the project: 1) researchers and academics; 2) History, Arts and Applied Arts teachers in high schools; 3) the interested general public.The study has confirmed the considerable interest of researchers and academics in this project, but has also pointed out their demanding standards. Compared to the existing offer on other sites, their requests are less concerned with new functionalities than on how well the tools perform, the speed of access and how exhaustive the information would be. Researchers are accustomed to working on the web and can therefore choose and compare what is on offer in the field of online manuscripts.For high schools teachers, the project is seen as an excellent potential teaching aid, but it would require suggestions for courses, themed presentations, selections (noteworthy pages) and a considerable effort to provide mediation (translated passages, reading in the original language, video conferences by specialists, analyses of pages). It is important to encourage them to browse around, in and through a marked space.Interest in the project is less marked in the interested general public, who would only consult medieval manuscripts and illuminated manuscripts from time to time, often motivated by family or cultural events. The illustrations are the main attraction for this public. Within the interested general public, however, there is one category very interested in the project, already identified among the users of cultural or online libraries: a population of seniors, fascinated by the process of how manuscripts are produced, calligraphy, paleography, etc.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.040 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".