ArchXAI Contributes to the Discussion on AI and Digital Preservation at the Estonian preservation seminar

On November 13th Sven Lepa, vice head of the access and enquiry
department at the National Archives of Estonia, gave an overview of the
prospects and first outputs of the ArchXAI project at the Estonian
preservation seminar in Tallinn.

The yearly event is organized in collaboration of the National Library
and National Archives of Estonia. This year’s seminar with the theme
“Digital preservation at the crossroads of crises and innovation”
explored how crises influence the accessibility and long-term
preservation of digital cultural heritage, emphasizing the importance of
safeguarding fragile digital data to protect collective memory and
identity. It also examined cooperation between memory institutions,
innovations in digital preservation, and the ways artificial
intelligence may shape the content and value of cultural heritage.

Artificial intelligence is also shaping the archival landscape in the
ArchXAI project, creating new possibilities for accessing archival
materials via text recognition, indexing and enquiry tools. With
preliminary results for the Estonian handwritten text recognition on
historical documents looking highly promising. The model has been
trained on approximately 50,000 lines of text dating from the 1850s to
the 1950s and has achieved a character error rate of 3.2% on the
in-domain test set, demonstrating the strong potential of AI-driven
methods for improving the usability and discoverability of archival
collections.

Read more about ArchXAI project: ArchXAI – Central Baltic