Utilising machine-learning tools to increase access to archival collections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the transformative potential of using machine-learning (ML) tools in archival institutions to enhance the accessibility of archival collections. It highlights the challenges faced by archival professionals in managing the vast volume and diversity of archival materials, including physical backlogs and the difficulties of describing both digitised and born-digital collections. The paper explores the history of artificial intelligence and its relevance to archival work before delving into two case studies conducted by the author, a metadata archivist at the University of Calgary, involving the use of handwritten text recognition and automatic speech recognition tools to extract descriptive metadata from archival finding aids and generate transcriptions of oral histories, respectively. Through a review of existing literature and practical case studies, the paper provides archival professionals with a foundational understanding of ML concepts and insights into how these technologies can be harnessed to improve the accessibility and usability of archival collections. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection, which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".