Archives Access and Artificial Intelligence

Archival Science

AI & Society, 2022

Co-authored by a Computer Scientist and a Digital Humanist, this article examines the challenges faced by cultural heritage institutions in the digital age, which have led to the closure of the vast majority of born-digital archival collections. It focuses particularly on cultural organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, used by historians, literary scholars and other Humanities scholars. Most born-digital records held by cultural organizations are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright, commercial and technical issues. Even when born-digital data are publicly available (as in the case of web archives), users often need to physically travel to repositories such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to consult web pages. Provided with enough sample data from which to learn and train their models, AI, and more specifically machine learning algorithms, offer the opportunity to improve and ease the access to digital archives by learning to perform complex human tasks. These vary from providing intelligent support for searching the archives to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. In this article, we focus on sensitivity review as a practical solution to unlock digital archives that would allow archival institutions to make non-sensitive information available. This promise to make archives more accessible does not come free of warnings for potential pitfalls and risks: inherent errors, "black box" approaches that make the algorithm inscrutable, and risks related to bias, fake, or partial information. Our central argument is that AI can deliver its promise to make digital archival collections more accessible, but it also creates new challenges-particularly in terms of ethics. In the conclusion, we insist on the importance of fairness, accountability and transparency in the process of making digital archives more accessible.

Archival Science, 2022

Access to data is seen as a key priority today. Yet, the vast majority of digital cultural data preserved in archives is inaccessible due to privacy, copyright or technical issues. Emails and other born-digital collections are often uncatalogued, unfindable and unusable. In the case of documents that originated in paper format before being digitised, copyright can be a major obstacle to access. To solve the problem of access to digital archives, cross-disciplinary collaborations are absolutely essential. The big challenges of our time-from global warming to social inequalities-cannot be solved within a single discipline. The same applies to the challenge of "dark" archives closed to users. We cannot expect archivists or digital humanists to find a magical solution that will instantly make digital records more accessible. Instead, we need to set up collaborations across disciplines that seldom talk to each other. Based on 21 interviews with 26 archivists, librarians and other professionals in cultural institutions, we identify key obstacles to making digitised and born-digital collections more accessible to users. We outline current levels of access to a wide range of collections in various cultural organisations, including no access at all and limited access (for example, when users are required to travel on-site to consult documents). We suggest possible solutions to the problems of access-including the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence to unlock "dark" archives inaccessible to users. Finally, we propose the creation of a global user community who would participate in decisions on access to digital collections.

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality - TEEM 2017, 2017

The availability of digitised cultural heritage content held by archives and other memory institutions improves their visibility, facilitate and increases access to information, allowing new kinds of research of digital heritage, namely Digital Humanities. This study intends to report how Municipal Archives of mainland Portugal are ensuring access to their digitized cultural heritage content. For this purpose, an analysis was held to collect data about online catalogues with digital objects linked to the archival description in 278 Municipal Archives of mainland Portugal. The data revealed that the openness of the primary information sources preserved by the municipal archives, which can be reused by all those who need them and particularly by digital humanists, is still in infancy.

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2024

Innovative technologies are improving the accessibility, preservation, and searchability of born-digital and digitised records. In particular, Artificial Intelligence is opening new opportunities for archivists and researchers. However, the experience of scholars (particularly humanities scholars) and other users remain understudied. This article asks how and why researchers and general users are, or are not, using computational methods. This research is informed by an open-call survey, completed by 22 individuals, and semi-structured interviews with 33 professionals, including archivists, librarians, digital humanists, literary scholars, historians, and computer scientists. Drawing on these results, this article offers an analysis of user experiences of computational research methods applied to digitised and born-digital archives. With a focus on humanities and social science researchers, this article also discusses users who resist this kind of research, perhaps because they lack the skills necessary to engage with these materials at scale, or because they prefer to use more traditional methods, such as close reading and historical analysis. Here, we explore the uses of computational and more "traditional" research methodologies applied to digital records. We also make a series of recommendations to elevate users' computational skills but also to improve the digital infrastructure to make archives more accessible and usable.

International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2019

The first special issue of International Journal of Digital Humanities (IJDH) is about born-digital archives, their preservation and research perspectives involving borndigital primary records in the humanities. This is not only a result of the collaboration between the journal's editor-in-chief, Gábor Palkó, Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Eötvös University, who is interested in the practice and theory of digital archives, and the editor of this volume, Thorsten Ries, who conducts research on born-digital dossiers génétiques with digital forensic methods at Ghent University. It is also meant to be a programmatic call to intensify cross-sectoral collaboration between galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions), digital preservation projects, and humanities research working with digital primary sources. The born-digital historical record of the present age poses great challenges for archival science, librarianship, museology, and information science on the one hand, and to humanities research on the other, next to offering exciting opportunities. Personal digital archives, legal, governmental, institutional, scientific, public, and non-governmental organisations' documentation records or datasets, public repositories of digital publications, web archives, and social media archives are incredibly rich, diverse and multi-faceted treasure troves for historians, political scientists, sociologists, philologists, literary scholars, art historians, digital humanists, and researchers from other humanities disciplines. The effort of long-term preservation, curator-and custodianship for these records and the development of setups, applications and application programming interfaces (API) to make them available for research has been subject of multiple large, successful international projects in archival science, librarianship, and information science. Landmark projects such as the archiving of the digital collections of Salman Rushdie at Emory University Library (Rockmore 2014; Waugh and Russey

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In recent decades, digitization has been presented as an important strategy both for the preservation of historic documents and for giving increased access for researchers to such materials. In the Norwegian context, this has not only implied the digitization of printed matter but also the digitization of audiovisual material like photography and analog tape recordings. From a technical perspective, there are of cause difficulties in digitizing such a variety of material when considering the diversity of media formats dating back to the nineteenth century. However, from the archival community criticism has been raised not only about the quality of the work but also the concerning the selection process, the organization of the material, and the collection of metadata. The National Library of Norway, especially, has attempted to avoid the problem of selection by attempting to digitize all of visual, sonic and audio-visual culture heritage. But this has created even greater challenges ...

2021

The digital transformation is turning archives, both old and new, into data. As a consequence, automation in the form of artificial intelligence techniques is increasingly applied both to scale traditional recordkeeping activities, and to experiment with novel ways to capture, organise and access records. We survey recent developments at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and archival thinking and practice. Our overview of this growing body of literature is organised through the lenses of the Records Continuum model. We find four broad themes in the literature on archives and artificial intelligence: theoretical and professional considerations, the automation of recordkeeping processes, organising and accessing archives, and novel forms of digital archives. We conclude by underlining emerging trends and directions for future work, which include the application of recordkeeping principles to the very data and processes which power modern artificial intelligence, and a more s...

The Journal of Literacy and Technology 12.3, 2011

This article offers a contemporary re-visioning of the gifts of archival work presented in Susan Wells' renowned "Claiming the Archive for Rhetoric and Composition" in light of digital archives.

Archival Science

Mass digitisation and the exponential growth of born-digital archives over the past two decades have resulted in an enormous volume of archives and archival data being available digitally. This has produced a valuable but under-utilised source of large-scale digital data ripe for interrogation by scholars and practitioners in the Digital Humanities. However, current digitisation approaches fall short of the requirements of digital humanists for structured, integrated, interoperable, and interrogable data. Linked Data provides a viable means of producing such data, creating machine-readable archival data suited to analysis using digital humanities research methods. While a growing body of archival scholarship and praxis has explored Linked Data, its potential to open up digitised and born-digital archives to the Digital Humanities is under-examined. This article approaches Archival Linked Data from the perspective of the Digital Humanities, extrapolating from both archival and digita...