iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This project is the first of many that @institutional.org is undertaking to help libraries and other knowledge institutions enable computational access to their collections. If you represent a library and would like to work together, we'd love to hear from you.

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Across 186yrs, we identified leadership changes, fundraising progress, and other strategic plans including the creation of race and gender policies following the Civil Rights Act as well as a 1921 $1M drive for a “women’s building,” launched after women were barred from entering the Michigan Union.

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Organizational decision-making is fertile ground for AI-assisted research, but board minutes often bury key decisions in narrative prose. Using reasoning models, we worked with U-M Library to extract & structure these decisions so researchers can use computational tools to study the evolution of U-M

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AI enables new forms of research, but only where information is computationally accessible. Today, @institutional.org and @umich.edu Library are releasing a structured dataset that makes 186 years of U-M’s Board of Regents Proceedings newly accessible. institutional.org/posts/instit...

Institutional Proceedings: 186 years of university decisions. | IDI

IDI and the University of Michigan Library have collaborated to release two centuries of the university’s governance decisions as a structured dataset that can be searched, analyzed, and reused.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 07/12/2025

AI is autotune (and Beat Detective) for culture writ large. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/m...

nytimes.com

Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?

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We're also sharing the pipeline we developed for Institutional Books that seamlessly dedupes, classifies, and enhances the data once GRIN Transfer brings it down. www.institutional.org/tools

Institutional Books | Institutional Data Initiative

Institutional Books 1.0 is our first release of public domain books. This set was originally digitized through Harvard Library’s participation in the Google Books project..

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That's why we built GRIN Transfer: a tool for downloading collections, big or small. GRIN Transfer handles request batching, failure recovery, and data aggregation so that libraries can focus on using the data rather than simply gaining access to it. www.institutional.org/posts/grin-t...

Announcing the release of GRIN Transfer

GRIN Transfer, an open source tool that allows Google Books partner libraries to more easily access their Google Books collection.

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We learned this lesson over the months it took to download 1M of Harvard Library's books for our Institutional Books release. As a result, many libraries have yet to take full advantage of the wonderful resources GRIN provides.

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When libraries join Google Books, Google not only scans their books, it also makes a wealth of image, OCR, & metadata available to them via the Google Return Interface (GRIN). But working with GRIN can be challenging, so we're releasing a tool to make it easier. www.institutional.org/posts/grin-t...

Announcing the release of GRIN Transfer

GRIN Transfer, an open source tool that allows Google Books partner libraries to more easily access their Google Books collection.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 24/07/2025

Amanda Watson, @institutionaldatainitiative.org's Library Chair and leader of Harvard Law School Library, spoke about the importance of publishing library collections as data to guide the future of AI. hls.harvard.edu/today/food-f...

hls.harvard.edu

Food for (AI) thought and the library initiative improving AI’s digital diet - Harvard Law School

Amanda Watson of the Harvard Law School Library says the release of Harvard’s digitized collection is only the beginning of collaborations between libraries and tech firms.

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Reposted by Greg Leppert

Ben Lee @bcgl.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

With @yh-huang.bsky.social, I'm excited to share our Digital Collections Explorer, an open-source, multimodal viewer for digital collections! Users can search with both natural language inputs and reverse image search. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961 Public demo: digital-collections-explorer.com

arxiv.org

Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections

We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital col...

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 23/06/2025

This starts in an hour.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 20/06/2025

This Monday, @institutionaldatainitiative.org will host Petr Knoth to share his experience leading CORE ("The world’s largest collection of open access research papers") as the rise of AI brings new meaning, and challenges, to stewarding knowledge repositories. Join us virtually via the link below.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 16/06/2025

Tomorrow, it's our pleasure to host @ayahbdeir.bsky.social to talk about the power of data in building an AI ecosystem that's open, transparent, and fair. 11am ET on June 17th. Register at the link below to attend virtually.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 14/04/2025

The @institutionaldatainitiative.org is proud to support The New Commons challenge. $100k grants along with mentorship. Let's get impactful data into the AI ecosystem.

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Reposted by Greg Leppert

Free Law Project ⚖ @free.law · 21/03/2025

To start the weekend, we've got a brand new experience for case law on CourtListener. It has better typography, more features and metadata, five million scanned decisions from @harvardlil.bsky.social, and a lot more. Read all about it and let us know what you think: free.law/2025/03/21/c...

free.law

A Faster, Smarter, Unified Case Law Experience

A redesigned case law modernizes the reading experience with enhanced layout and typography, more advanced features, better speed, and more.

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The @institutionaldatainitiative.org at Harvard works with knowledge institutions to increase the availability, diversity, and responsible use of training data for AI. Reach out and join us.

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Boston Public Library Expands Access to Collections Through AI-Enhanced Digitization

Our goal is to develop methods and tools that can support expert staff at libraries everywhere, increasing the breadth of materials that can be digitized and the speed at which they’re made accessible to the public. Learn more at BPL: www.bpl.org/news/boston-...

bpl.org

BOSTON, MA – March 12, 2025 - The Boston Public Library (BPL) is launching a large-scale digitization project to unlock hundreds of thousands…

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Together, we’ll research opportunities to generate machine-readable representations of items, add searchable metadata, and begin the structuring of entire collections—all at the moment each item leaves the imaging station.

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IDI and BPL are working to change this by collaborating at the outset of a large digitization project, exploring how AI might complement human expertise and strengthen the process in its earliest stages.

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BPL is embarking on a new initiative to digitize hundreds of thousands of historic items. Conventional approaches to this scale lead to an impossible choice: sacrifice depth for breadth or drastically limit what gets digitized. AI tools can help, but they’re relegated to the end of the process.

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institutionaldatainitiative.org

As the @institutionaldatainitiative.org expands its mission, we’re announcing a collaboration with @bpl.boston.gov to develop AI-driven tools capable of accelerating new digitization at libraries across the world, starting at the Boston Public Library. institutionaldatainitiative.org/posts/using-...

Using AI to Accelerate Digitization at Boston Public Librarys

Today, as part of our mission expansion, we’re announcing a collaboration with BPL to develop AI-driven tools capable of accelerating new digitization of large collections at libraries across the worl...

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With our digitization at Harvard Law School Library, we'll work to increase access to unique collections, such as the Supreme Court Records and Briefs that are critical to understanding decision-making at the highest U.S. court yet remain largely inaccessible.

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If you're part of a library, university, or other knowledge institution and interested in working with a team of data scientists to refine and publish your data, we'd love to chat. And if you're a data scientist or community builder interested in working with institutions, we're hiring.

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IDI is building a collection of large, impactful, and widely available datasets to increase AI’s accessibility and diversity while reaffirming institutions as stewards of knowledge.

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institutionaldatainitiative.org

I'm pleased to announce we're expanding our mission at the @institutionaldatainitiative.org with an open call for institutional collaborators, new digitization at Harvard Law School Library, and additional support to advance this work. institutionaldatainitiative.org/posts/open-c...

Expanding Our Mission: An Open Call for Collaborators

Today, we’re pleased to announce an open call for institutional collaborators as new support expands the research capacity of the Institutional Data Initiative.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 21/12/2024

The key is involving the institutions themselves in the conversation. Their missions are as much a reflection of the cultures they help to preserve as the data itself, and integrating them is critical as we look for new models to foster and interact with knowledge.

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Greg Leppert @leppert.me · 21/12/2024

@karaswisher.bsky.social and @ylecun.bsky.social discuss our @institutionaldatainitiative.org in the latest Pivot. It's essential that we establish equitable and sustainable models for data access and stewardship in the age of AI, and IDI is working on exactly that podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

podcasts.apple.com

Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Makes the Case for Open Source | On With Kara Swisher

Podcast Episode · Pivot · 12/21/2024 · 55m

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Our launch is generously supported by @microsoft.com and OpenAI, and these projects are just the start. If you’re part of an institution, we’d love to hear how we can help. If you’re an AI/ML researcher, we'd love to collaborate. We're also hiring for our core team, here at Harvard. Reach out.

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We're also working with Boston Public Library on an active scanning project of theirs involving millions of pages taken from public domain newspapers. We're hoping to make progress on some of the classic OCR challenges presented by newspapers, while evaluating the resulting data for model training.

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Our first project is a collection of 1M public domain books, scanned at Harvard Library as part of the Google Books project. We're fortunate enough to have the support of Google in releasing this dataset and will do so in early 2025 with accompanying analysis.

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Our goal is to work within the missions of institutions to help unlock and improve access to their collections, not only for AI uses but traditional patron access as well. This work can help expand the breadth of people that institutional collections and AI models are able to empower.

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As a team of technologists who deeply value knowledge institutions, we designed @institutionaldatainitiative.org as a gear to help the AI and institutional communities, each moving at their own unique speeds, mesh and transfer energy between them. Energy, experience, and expertise.

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Data access and integrity are two things institutions know well. They hold vast collections and think a lot about knowledge access and stewardship. Stewardship is a nice word because it conveys a sense of integrity over time, and time is something institutions excel at utilizing.

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Data access plays an important role in the development of AI models. It helps define who is represented in them, who they empower, and even who can build them. Data integrity, as a result, is important as well.

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