Category: News
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Tokens: How AI tools measure your usage
Most of us picture an AI service as a chat window. You type a question, it answers, and whether you’re on a free account or paying a monthly fee, you rarely see a ceiling. So it can be puzzling to hear that someone managed to exhaust a $150 monthly plan before the middle of the…
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A Python Tool for Restoring Spatial Search to VLM Transcriptions
When Large Language Models (LLMs) began cleaning up optical character recognition (OCR) output, or when Vision Language Models (VLMs) bypassed OCR and transcribed page images directly, something improved for researchers but something else broke. The text itself became dramatically cleaner: proper reading order, accurate spelling, no hyphens fracturing words across line breaks (example: “Pythagoras” rendered…
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Matt Huculak in Conversation with Masud Khokhar for IFLA
Director Matt Huculak (University of Victoria) was invited to speak with Masud Khokhar (University of Leeds) at the inaugural session of the “IFLA Futures Club,” which is being launched as part of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions centenary (2026–2027). The series is intended to provide a sustained conversation around embedding futures thinking…
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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…