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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.
Table of Contents
Vision
Revolutionize how researchers, students, and the global community access and explore Harvard's extensive collections, making all kinds of information easily discoverable and accessible.
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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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Sprints | Outcome | Responsible Parties |
|---|---|---|
| Sprint 1 | Gained foundational understanding of back end, and established collaboration practices with each other and other HUIT and LTS colleagues. | Technical Project Team |
| Sprint 2 | Investigated front end frameworks and decided on React, diagramed a draft front end architecture, and "made real" step 3 (semantic retrieval) in order to help begin the front end work. See recording of demo here. | Technical Project Team |
Sprint 3 | Initialize front end development (big win: to work with fastapi for semantic retrieval), finish deploy of semantic retrieval, and experiment with one LLM generative feature and finish indexing the Finding Aids. See recording of demo here. | Technical Project Team |
Sprint 4 | Continuing work on front end, making it deployable on dev and finishing back end generative AI features work. Planning for usability testing. See recorded demo here. | Technical Project Team |
Sprint 5 | Fix the data issues with Finding Aids, add new set to index and investigate adding CURIOSity items to index. Finalize front end work and create end to end testing. By end of sprint, estimate when usability can begin. See a recording of the demo here. | Technical Project Team |
Sprint 6 | Finalizing adding finding aids to index, designing for how to display hierarchical 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. See a recording of the demo here. | Technical Project Team |
Definition of Done
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Description | Plan | Impact | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rapidly changing Generative AI space | Build system to be flexible, swap out models easily | Cost, trust | Technical Project Team |
| Library metadata quality is varied and semantic retrieval works with unstructured data | See if metadata fields can help the quality of embeddings; experiment with different embedding models, focusing on full text content and multi-modal models for digital images | Quality of retrieval | Metadata creators and Technical Project Team |
| Unexpected changes to other library systems like Aeon, JSTOR Forum | Account for and expect changes from external systems in design of data pipeline | Timeline delays | Technical Project Team |
| Staff capacity to support work of the project | Meeting weekly with stakeholders to ensure there is enough time to plan for bouts of work that include time from broader staff | Overall project success | Library Stakeholders |
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