Ethical AI at the British Library: A PhD Placement Project

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is a “comprehensive platform for the digitization, AI-powered text recognition, transcription, and searching of historical documents” while AntConc is a “freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis”.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.