What is ArCH?
“Once fully developed, our vision is that galleries, libraries, archives and museums across the world could implement their own instances of the hub, thereby making cultural heritage collections worldwide more discoverable”
Dr Amelie Roper, Project Lead and Head of Research at Cambridge University Library
The University of Cambridge’s libraries, archives, museums and Herbarium house over 15 million items, many of which remain underexplored.
The AI for Cultural Heritage (ArCH) project was created to help unlock these rich resources and investigate how artificial intelligence (AI) can make collections more accessible, discoverable and meaningful for researchers, cultural heritage practitioners and the public. It is part of a portfolio of projects managed by the University Library Research Institute, a centre for collections-led research at Cambridge University Library.
Cultural heritage collections contain vast amounts of untapped knowledge, yet many institutions lack the skills and resources to explore using AI to open up this material. ArCH was established to address this gap, creating a secure and user-friendly environment where researchers and heritage professionals could use AI tools to discover new insights, improve access to collections and unlock the full potential of cultural heritage data.
“The ArCH project is based on a belief that cultural heritage collections should be accessible to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment.”
Image caption: Project team credit Eleanor Parmenter / Cambridge University Library
Developing the AI for Cultural Heritage Hub
ArCH’s success and impact are the product of interdisciplinary collaboration. Bringing together cultural heritage practitioners, digital humanities specialists, AI experts, developers and academics creates opportunities for more innovative research and better outcomes. Specialists from Cambridge University Library Jennie Fletcher (Lead Developer), Tuan Pham (Head of Digital Innovation and Development) and Amparo Gimeno-Sanjuan (Assistant Software Developer) were key in building the ArCH hub and providing expertise on prompting. The hub is an experimental safe space where users can log in, upload their own cultural heritage data and experiment with a suite of AI tools. Taking time to ensure team members from different disciplines were “speaking the same language” was an essential part of making that collaboration successful and developing a hub that could meet a range of cultural heritage use cases. These include transcribing handwritten and printed text, sentiment analysis and image labelling.
Video caption: ArCH hub demonstration by Lead Developer, Jennie Fletcher