Developing an Online Database on a Shoestring: Growing Pains at the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Online Medieval Sources Bibliography (OMSB) is a database of modern editions of medieval primary sources. This paper discusses the computing, financing, and logistical challenges we faced in creating the database, as well as our solutions. The OMSB is aimed at a wide audience, from high school students to professors, so we have had to tailor our data to the needs of many different types of researcher, and to keep in mind all of the different ways someone might search for sources. Working with a very limited budget, we have made use of graduate and undergraduate students to provide both programming and data entry, a solution that has provided excellent research experience (and often much-needed funding) for the students involved.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.026 | 0.107 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.030 | 0.043 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.041 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.026 |
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".