Enhancing the value of the digitised record, including OCR transcriptions, captioning and Amplify Jenna Bain, Digital Projects Leader presented at Digital collecting for NSW public library staff, 27 May 2019

1. Jenna Bain
Digital Projects Leader
Enhancing the value of your digital collections

2. What do I mean by accessibility?

3. What do I mean by accessibility?
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA)
Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust

4. Are you providing a meaningful research
experience for your users?

5. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Technology that enables you to convert
documents, such as scanned PDFs or images
of text, into machine readable data that is
editable and searchable.

6. Trove

7. Crowdsourcing

8. intelligence (AI) that allows software
applications to become more accurate
in predicting outcomes and patterns
without being explicitly programmed.
Machine learning is a form of artificial

9. Google Maps
Siri
Cortana
Netflix
Spotify
Email spam filters
Facebook facial recognition

13. T
I
G
gE
R

14. aggingT
magesI
enerically forG
g xploration &E
esearchR

15. Animal – 99.84%
Horse – 99.84%
Mammal – 99.84%
Wagon – 99.58%
Horse cart – 99.58%
Vehicle – 99.58%
Transportation – 99.58%
Wheel – 99.27%
Person – 99.94%
Man – 95.39%
Drum – 94.01%
Musical instrument – 88.62%

16. Insect – 97.39%
Invertebrate – 97.39%
Flea – 97.21%
Animal – 97.21%
Apparel – 99.76%
Bonnet – 98.67%
Hat – 98.67%
Portrait – 96.25%
Artwork – 95.24%

17. Boat – 98.36%
Outdoor – 97.78%
Water – 96.18%
Rowboat – 95.95%
Nature – 95.95%
People – 95.92%
Outdoors – 99.99%
Nature – 99.99%
Landscape – 99.99%
Aerial view – 98.24%
Plane – 96.72%
Transportation – 91.12%
Aircraft – 91.12%

20. Bird – 99.91%
Animal – 99.91%
Pelican – 92.97%

21. Accessibility ≠ perfection

22. “…a 25% error rate in word recognition would make a
transcription unreadable but does not significantly reduce its
usefulness for discovery by a search engine as peoples’ use of
Oard, 2012
spoken language quite often includes a lot of redundancy”.

23. 13,000 sessions
204,000 corrections
6100 users
61 countries
USAGE SINCE LAUNCH
126 transcripts complete

24. International visitation since launch

25. International visitation since launch

26. Amplify statewide rollout

27. onlineocr.net
abbyy.com/en-au/finereader
voicebase.com
trint.com
zooniverse.com
cloud.google.com/vision
imagga.com
autotag.me
Automated image tagging
Crowd platforms
digivol.ala.org.au
Machine transcription
OCR

28. Thank you 
Questions?