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Finalizing adding finding aids, designing for how to display heirarchical items from Finding Aids and CURIOSity. Add in CURIOSity items to index, add in document type to eyebrow on front end. Confirm LLM selection and system prompts through team testing. Finalize front end in preparation for release to QA in Sprint 7.

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Problem and Value Statements

Problem Statement

Since its founding, Harvard Library has been a guardian of the University’s memory and a gateway to the world's knowledge. We currently host an array of discovery systems that use different design approaches, organizational priorities, and technology standards. Scholars and the public expect to be able to find trustworthy information and discover resources easily regardless of the system that is managing and providing access to it.

Solution Business Value

By enabling rich cross-collection search, this project will offer end users intuitive, contextual discovery of special collections, archives and digital collections, through a mix of conversational interfaces, browsing that emphasizes the visual nature of materials when appropriate, and recommendations for similar or related resources, all informed by ongoing user research.

Alignment with Harvard Library Multi-Year Goals and Objectives

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Team Member

Title

Project Role(s)

Enrique DiazManager of Library Software EngineeringProduct Owner (LTS)
Doug SimonSenior Digital Library Software EngineerDeveloper (LTS)
JJ ChenDigital Library Data EngineerDeveloper (LTS)
Maura MeagherAssociate UX DeveloperDeveloper (LTS)
Carolyn CaizziSenior IT Project ManagerProject Manager/ Scrum Lead (LTS)
Meg McMahonUX ResearcherUX Researcher/Designer (HL)

Estimated Schedule

Note: Project is managed by using the Scrum framework and these phases/milestones will be adjusted. Below is a tentative schedule.

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version2

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a high level schedule. See more detailed view of project tasks here.


Phase

Phase Start

Phase End

Completion Milestone

1

July 2024

September 2024

Natural language discovery platform with generative AI features for discovering digitized, special and archival collections is built and released to QA for testing.
2

October 2024

December 2024Platform is tested by end users and improvements are recommended. Research into scaling platform for production is completed. Data pipeline is scoped and work begins. Design process for digitized collections (images) component is completed.
3

January 2025

March 2025Data pipeline and digitized collections components begin to be built. Decision to soft launch discovery platform is made depending on data pipeline.
4

April 2025

June 2025Cont. building data pipeline and digitized collections components.  Platform is monitored for costs and analytics are gathered and reviewed to plan for full launch September 2025. 
5-12



Years 2-3 will build out full text search integration, more types of digital collection discovery, and access, as well as continuously improve the platform.  Investigation into  and possible rollout of workflows for using AI to improve quality of metadata. 

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