Computational analysis of early printed book descriptions (PhD Placement)

Computational analysis of early printed book descriptions (PhD Placement)

The British Library’s collections of early printed books published in the 15th century (known as ‘incunabula’) comprises ca 23,000 volumes and is one of the most important and frequently used resources by researchers. The incunabula collection was catalogued in the ‘Catalogue of books printed in the 15th century now at the British Museum [or Library]’ (known as the BMC) over a period of 100 years between 1908 – 2007, and the detailed descriptions are a valuable source of information about the collection content, acquisition, transmission, previous ownership, and materiality. As part of a previous digital scholarship project (https://app.transkribus.org/sites/BL-Incunabula) we used computational methods with the incunabula descriptions from BMC volumes 1-10 as means of improving our understanding of the collection’s cataloguing history and curatorial practice. The PhD placement will help us to progress this work for two further volumes of the BMC and prepare more incunabula descriptions data for publication and analysis. The Library’s digital scholarship projects have demonstrated the value of providing access to our collections catalogues as data for research, public engagement, innovation and creativity. This work makes an important contribution to the Library’s mission and especially to the Race Equality Action Plan as it creates and enhances metadata to remove barriers to discovery and improves the accessibility of our collection.
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    Item type:Journal article,
    Ethical AI at the British Library, A PhD Placement Project
    (2026-04-15)
    Croen, Jeanette
    This article is a scholarly reflection on using the AI tools Transkribus and AntConc as part of a digital humanities PhD Placement within the British Library to extract metadata from printed catalogues for the online catalogue. This project focuses on BMC XI, the catalogue of English Incunabula at the British Library published in 2007. Transkribus is a “comprehensive platform for the digitization, AI-powered text recognition, transcription, and searching of historical documents” while AntConc is a “freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis”. Together, these tools can be used to extract information en masse to be uploaded to the specialist databases MEI (Material Evidence Incunabula) and the ISTC (Incunabula Short Title Catalogue) as well as pick out patterns and trends within incunabula descriptions. This project followed FRAIM (Framing responsible AI implementation and management) principles.
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