State Archives of Belgium – A specialist in computer science or digital humanities m/f/x
Context
FED-tWIN is a research program of the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) aimed at promoting sustainable cooperation between federal scientific establishments and Belgian
universities, by funding common research profiles.
Today, the FED-tWIN program makes it possible to open a function for the ARKEY project (“A content-enriched user-oriented access key to digital archives”). It involves on the one hand the National Archives and State Archives in the Provinces (in short the State Archives, or AGR), a federal scientific institution, and on the other hand the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain).
Goals
The main objective of the ARKEY research profile is to improve the digital valorisation of archive collections through long-term tools. It involves (1) the research and development of an enhanced access key to digitized and digital-born content, and (2) the improvement of the navigation experience within archive collections. It builds on the expertise of a multidisciplinary team from AGR and from several research groups within UCLouvain (see “Partners” section below). ARKEY aims to bring added value for society and public service, by improving the accessibility and intelligibility of archives: a priority for many researchers and a foundation of democratic states.
Currently, AGR and UCLouvain own a large number of digitized and digital-born documents from a wide variety of sources from different periods. This diversity offers a challenge to automated content analysis, particularly to optical character recognition (OCR) tools, which are not trained to such variation. Archives are also challenged by storage, format, metadata, and navigation of digital documents: most of these documents are not sufficiently spotlighted.