Category: News
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From Field Notes to Metadata: Exploring OCR and Chandra for MLP Workflows
By Chloë Farr and Kate Fryer The Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) is a group of passionate researchers who work with historic and modern mountain photographs to document landscape change over time. Repeat photography is central to this work. By returning to the same locations where historic survey photographs were taken MLP researchers can create visual…
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Community Archives & Scholarship Commons: Notes from A Summer At UVic Libraries
By Lambert Heller, for the Kula Blog In 2025 I had the honor to be the first International Visiting Fellow at Kula: Library Futures Academy, a new initiative launched at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries. UVic sits on the beautiful south coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, with the Mearns Centre for Learning…
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New Report Published: AI in Research at UVic
The Kula: Library Futures Academy is pleased to published the first report out of the 2025-2026 Seed Fund initative at UVic Libraries. AI in Research at UVic: Findings from a UVic Libraries-Hosted Focus Group is a study by the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries that used a qualitative approach to explore UVic researchers’ perspectives on…
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AI Project of Kula Fellow and UVic Librarian featured in EurekAlert!
A new feature story in EurekAlert! — a nonprofit platform focusing on scientific news run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — highlights a joint research project of Kula Fellow Chloë Farr and UVic’s Digital Preservation Librarian Corey Davis, focusing on the use of AI to unlock historical newspaper archives held…
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Accelerating History: AI and Optical Character Recognition Seminar
We are excited to co-present with the University of Alberta Digital Scholarship Centre on some of the work we’ve been doing with OCR and vision language models! Description: From the 1990s to the 2010s, the pace of development in text and handwritten tech was steady, but over the last 2-3 years, advancements have accelerated dramatically.…
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Notes from a Library AI Research Visit at the University of Alberta
I spent the first two weeks of 2026 visiting the University of Alberta (UofA) Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC) for an informal exploratory period focused on knowledge exchange and relationship-building. The goal was to share Kula & UVic Libraries’ work integrating and teaching GenAI in academic library/archive contexts, learn from UofA’s staff, researchers, and students, and…
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Making Scanned Data Tables Usable with AI
Back in October 2025, Nick Rochlin, our Science and Data Librarian, sent me a folder of scans of data tables typed in the 1980s. A student had contacted Nick asking if there was an automated way to convert their paper data tables into a format that would allow for computational analysis. There didn’t seem to be…
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Exploring AI integrations in Libraries & Archives
I’m Chloë Farr, the Kula: Library Futures Academy Graduate Student Fellow in AI. I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Linguistics, and I am currently a PhD student in Computer Science at UVic. My background in humanities sometimes gives me some unique perspectives in Computer Science. Over the last few months, I’ve been deeply…
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Building Transnational Queer & Trans+ Connections
By Michael Radmacher, Transgender Archives Metadata Librarian A popular storytelling mechanism begins the story at the end of the tale. But what if the story doesn’t have an ending? This conundrum may be the point of Kula: Library Futures Academy, to be a catalyst for beginnings, not endings. So, for now, let’s buck the storytelling…
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KULA Postdoctoral Fellow Awarded Hannah Arendt Fellowship
Kula: Library Futures Academy is pleased to announce that Nathaniel Brunt, VPRI Aspiration 2030 & Kula Postdoctoral Fellow, has received the prestigious 2026 Hannah Arendt Fellowship awarded by the German state of Lower Saxony and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The grant application was sponsored by German librarian Lambert Heller, Head of the Open Science…