If you're interested in creating your own archival scanner, there are a few key components and considerations to keep in mind. Here's a basic overview of what you'll need and some steps to get started: Once you have gathered the necessary components, here's a general process to follow: Creating an effective archival scanner involves attention […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage

Advice from Archives for Black Lives
How do you handle racist language in your archives? This is, unfortunately, a perennial issue. The Archives for Black Lives group in 2019 published Anti-Racist Description Resources. While you should read the whole thing (especially if you have materials pertaining to slavery), I wanted to pull out some practical bits to share with you: Consider […]

ChatGPT for Libraries and Archives
Last May 19, Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar to discuss ChatGPT for libraries and archives. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, presents a breakdown of what ChatGPT is and how it affects libraries and archives. This was FromThePage's most-attended webinar, and it was exciting to have so many people join. […]

Measuring Success in Crowdsourcing Projects
On July 28, Sara and I hosted the first FromThePage User Group Meeting in Washington DC. It was a fun event--to me it felt more like a party than a meeting, since I got to spend most of my time introducing my colleagues to each other. (That said, cocktails were replaced with breakfast tacos, which […]
ChatGPT, r/AskHistorians, & Spam
Vice recently published an article about ChatGPT generated spam on the popular AskHistorians subreddit. Here’s an excerpt: "The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being “on time” is a modern concept; […]
What Machines Can’t Replace: Old Fashioned Human Efforts
Let’s talk about transcription in scholarly editions – those collections of “papers” by or about historical or literary figures, published for readers and researchers. There are basically three ways edition projects transcribe papers. The first is the old-school way with staff members doing it manually. The second is a group effort, which can be done […]