Reconstructing the missing decks
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Of the 11,688 video recordings in the collection’s talk holdings, 11,240 — ninety-six percent — have no accompanying slide deck. The deck is usually where the substance is: the numbers, the network …
Reading a journal that has no text
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. ConneXions — The Interoperability Report (1987–1996) came to the collection as page scans with no text layer at all: 115 issues, 3,573 pages, unreadable to search and to everything downstream of search. …
Fiber route maps in the conference record
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Operators have been putting maps of their fiber builds on conference slides for thirty years. Most of those maps were shown once and filed away. This note describes finding them in the collection, judging …
Using collection context to reduce errors in automated transcription of historical audio
Thursday, July 23, 2026 in Practice Notes
This note is also available as a typeset PDF. Background We recently accessioned the Internet Talk Radio collection (Carl Malamud, 1993–1996; 567 audio items mirrored from archive.org). To make the audio searchable and citable we need transcripts. We …