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 at UVic Libraries.
Their project is creating a pipeline for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — a technique that allows chatbot outputs to rely on external resources as a source of truth over the underlying AI model’s general training data — and optical character recognition (OCR) to the Daily Colonist archive held by UVic Libraries, making decades of local history better searchable and more accessible with greater precision than before.
Chloë and Corey are aware of both the potential and responsibilities that come with their work:
“We’re spending more time pausing on questions and thinking about the answers, than working on the technical solutions. We’re prioritizing the benefit over the innovation, and we’re very open to dialogue on this topic.” — Chloë Farr
On May 20, 2026, Chloë will present her and Corey’s work to an international audience at Bibliocon, the largest library conference in the German-speaking world.
Read the full interview at: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1118632