AI, Accessibility, and Library Archives

In this first episode of our third season, we talk to software engineers and old-book-enthusiasts Ben Brumfield and Sara Carlstead Brumfield, the power-couple duo who founded From the Page, a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents.

We spoke with them about the idiosyncrasies of working with archival documents, the technological challenges of making metadata accessible while staving off poorly behaved bots that crash library sites in their quest for more training data, how technology changes the ways we interact with and engage archival work, and how AI can increase accessibility to these documents.

To learn more about the texts, ideas, and people mentioned in this interview, and to access a transcript, visit the episode guide on HoldingHistory.org.

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