2025 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference and Minnesota Digital Library

Digitization is about more than imaging. It can also be about using human and machine-readable pathways and discovery systems to broaden access to the widest range of users. In the past, digitization of archival collections has focused on capturing and accessing images of hand-written material. In the current cultural heritage environment, providing access to images of archival textual material alone is not enough. Today’s archival collections need to be searchable and transcribable. This session will discuss how the University Libraries uses technology such as OCR and AI and also uses the public to explore and transcribe digitized texts. We will talk about how archives are crowdsourcing digitized transcripts with students, staff and the public.