Re-engineering Search in FromThePage -- February 27, 2025
Searching archival collections across diverse institutions is challenging. Volunteers, genealogists, and librarians each have unique needs, from locating relevant crowdsourcing projects to tracing ancestral names or finding specific documents via metadata and call numbers. Our collections range from untranscribed scans to fully indexed texts enhanced by OCR and HTR systems, LLMs, or manual efforts.
This webinar will explain how we consolidated five distinct MySQL-backed search functionalities into a single search engine while still respecting organization scope and privacy restrictions.
Highlights include:
Rationale: Insights from user feedback and group meetings that prompted the integration.
Live Demo: Explore the new range of searches, from site-wide project discovery to detailed searches within an organization’s collections.
Challenges: Addressing issues like line-spanning words, markup variations, and multilingual content.
Emerging Issues: Adjusting to a unified search that demands detailed context for each result.
Results and Process: How last summer’s analytics led to surprising insights, user stories, and the development of a new product requirement document.
Future Possibilities: Opportunities for thematic, cross-institutional search portals.
Join us to discover how these changes have streamlined searches, enhancing user experience across FromThePage.
The webinar is on February 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM EST, 11:00 AM CST, and 9:00 AM PST. Signing up will send you an invitation with the details and a follow up with the recording.
Your First Crowdsourcing Project -- April 24, 2025
Join Ben and Sara Brumfield of FromThePage as they step you through your first crowdsourcing project. The session covers selecting material, finding volunteers, developing transcription conventions, keeping volunteers engaged, and what to do with your transcriptions once you're done.
The webinar is on April 25, 2025 at 12:00 PM EST, 11:00 AM CST, and 9:00 AM PST. Signing up will send you an invitation with the details and a follow up with the recording.