How can we use AI, OCR/HTR and other emerging technology to datafy our digitised collections and provide computational access to our born-digital collections on a national and global scale?

Background

Our next responsibility is to provide access: to “arrange that reasonable facilities are available to the public for inspecting and obtaining copies of those public records in the Public Record Office”. The nature of what this entails has evolved through time, and it now encompasses both physical and digital access to our collection. We believe that access should be global, for the many communities around the world represented within the record of the British state; and computational, to provide meaningful ‘big’ data for emerging technological approaches to the archive. We must become a ‘genuinely inclusive, collaborative and available national archive’.

This research theme captures our ambition to unlock our collections in new ways, for example through AI, optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR); to foreground global majority voices in our collection and centre the communities represented therein, working in partnership with other global institutions; and, closer to home, to overcome the immediate challenges of hazardous materials in our collection and distributed data within our heritage science and conservation practice.

The above must be underpinned by a secure and sustainable digital estate, for our collection and research work, ensuring that every output we create is open, accessible and has a permanent digital legacy.