Semantic Technology in Archives

CLASS: LIS 60050 Research and Assessment in Library and Information Science

PROJECT: Research Proposal: Investigating the Use of Semantic Technology in Archives

PLO(s):

• PLO 2: Critique and synthesize research and identify appropriate research methodologies to solve problems in the field.

• PLO 4: Identify and evaluate systems and technologies in order to implement improvements and innovations relevant to a particular information context.

ANNOTATION: As semantic technology improves allowing computers to increasingly understand and distill human language patterns, opportunities emerge for the use of these technologies. Archival materials can be difficult to access and require careful reading to comprehend. Digitization has increased access to archival materials by making documents available digitally and, when openly shared on the internet, available regardless of users’ physical proximity to the collection. Typed transcriptions of handwritten documents in archival collections represent another leap forward in access, making the documents easily readable to both humans and machines. This research investigates the additional potential uses of archival transcriptions to aid access and discovery using free online semantic tools to generate tags and extract entities.

SAA Core Values:

• Actively contribute ideas and resources to our field’s body of theoretical and practical scholarship.