ArchXAI at Festival Lampa 2026
In Cēsis in Latvia, on July 10 and 11, at the LAMPA conversation festival, the National Archives of Latvia (NAL) invited visitors over two days to take part in activities at the “Family Tree Tent” and presented the achievements of the international ArchXAI project.
At the heart of the program on both days was the demonstration “Artificial intelligence versus old handwriting in church books: can technology read the past?” The demonstration was led by Mairita Lukianska, digitalization expert at NAL, together with partner organizations – on the first day with Marija Šumilo-Vēza from the Latvian War Museum, and on the second with Guna Dancīte from the “Latvians Abroad” museum and research center.
The demonstration used handwriting samples provided by the partner organizations, including examples where recognition doesn’t yet work flawlessly. This allowed for an open discussion with genealogy enthusiasts and festival visitors about the factors affecting handwriting recognition model results, as well as opportunities to improve those results. Throughout the festival there was strong interest in the AI technologies being developed under the project, along with interest to see the solutions become available for broader practical use sooner.
“It’s important to understand – what you saw are not final models, we’re still working on refining them,” Lukianska emphasized during the demonstration. “And the more examples we prepare, the better the models becomes at recognizing and reading handwriting.”
Since the project began, a significant amount of work has been completed at NAL: 580 storage units, or 130,000 pages, have already been processed through digitalization orders, with 11 NAL staff members working on material segmentation and transcription. From September 2025 to April 2026, 2,800 images in Latvian (approximately 400,000 words) and 1,200 images in Russian (approximately 165,000 words) were segmented and transcribed. Within the project, NAL has established collaborations with the Latvian War Museum, the “Latvians Abroad” museum and research center, the University of Latvia’s Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, and the National Library of Latvia.
ArchXAI is an international project led by the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (XAMK) in cooperation with the National Archives of Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. The project’s goal is to improve archival services and access to information using artificial intelligence technologies. As a result, several AI-based solutions will be piloted, including handwriting recognition (HTR) and optical character recognition (OCR) tools for Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, and Russian.
ArchXAI Survey: Improving Archive Services and Digital Tools
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