Our team has spent the past 18 or so months developing various aspects of the British Online Archives (BOA) platform. All changes have been made based on consultation with and feedback from student-led focus groups, academics, and librarians. In the coming weeks, we will be explaining these changes in greater detail. But for now, we have put together a brief insight into several of the most important ones:
Discovery. BOA has recently joined forces with Ex Libris to make our online primary resources more discoverable via its Primo library discovery service. This will provide students and researchers with fast access to our products and intuitive ways to explore content.
Searchability. We have begun a process of further improving our search engine with a filtering system per collection that will ensure documents and other items of interest are more easily found. Around half of our collections now have this dedicated search facility and we expect the process to be complete by the end of March.
Handwritten Text Recognition. A number of our newer collections now contain handwritten content that can be searched at image level. We shall be continuing to roll this out across a number of other collections in 2022.
New Image Viewer. We now have a IIIF standard image viewer installed for many of our newer collections, enhancing image quality, dynamism, and interactivity with deep-zoom capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We are in the process of introducing machine learning technologies that will enhance our content and its discoverability.
COUNTER. We are now compliant with COUNTER Release 5 usage reports, giving librarians greater control of and insight into measuring usage data across all our collections.
Contextual Essays. We are investing more time and effort in providing much more contextual information surrounding our collections, including essays from respected academics as well as free-to-view articles.
For more information about how we are improving user experience, please contact us.