Collections

Bringing It All Together: Methods for Cataloging News Articles for the BNDA Version 2.0

Since its initial launch in September 2022, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) has established itself as one of the most comprehensive digital records of racial homicides collected to date. This blog series aims to highlight the work of the archivists on the BNDA team and their experiences preparing for the launch of BNDA Version 2.0. You can read more about the Version 2.0 update in Gathering the Red Record: A Two-Day Convening on Linking Racial Violence Archives.

Methods Overview

The first thing I have to say about the archival work methods for cataloging news articles at the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project’s BNDA is that they are a team effort. The workflow structure is maintained through shared instructions, templates, the data dictionary, and a responsive, organized supervising team.

All of the archives assistant work is digital. Archives assistants receive batches of news articles to catalog in the form of spreadsheets with links to images of the original newspaper articles stored in the Digital Repository Service. We then verify those articles against information we currently have and complete standardized fields for the information we want supplied. If we encounter a question about the records that we can’t answer with assurance, we flag it to be reviewed by either our supervisors or the legal team.

When completed, those standardized spreadsheets are reviewed by the supervising team and transformed into a format compatible for inclusion in the BNDA. Having multiple team members verify information improves the accuracy of the records and makes for sustainable collections processing practices.

Our goal is to add as much accurate and data-verified cataloged information as possible in order to provide supporting evidence of each incident, case, and victim identifier. These standardized identifiers, as well as authorized names for each unique individual, allow the team to take advantage of the relational-based search capability of the Airtable database. Not only does this system help us make better cataloged records, it allows for more retrievable information for future research.

Examples in the Records

Washington Sniper Victims
One example of data verification is to identify the victim(s) present in a news article whenever possible, even when minimal information is present. Breaking news articles often lack details. Names can be absent or incorrect, or focus on the perpetrator of the crime rather than the victim. One strategy I find helpful is to work by victim-subject, going through batches of news articles that are all related to one victim or group of victims. This allows me to glean patterns of context clues that allow for victim identification even if the victim is unnamed.

Newspaper clipping with the headline "Baffled D.C. Police Sift Tangled Clues In Hunt for Sniper"
News article describing the ongoing search for the perpetrator and victims in the D. C. sniper case. Evening star. Washington, D.C.: October 16, 1940.
List of metadata tied to an article titled "Evening Star. Washington, D.C.: October 16, 1940. Baffled D.C. Police Sift Tangled Clues in Hunt for Sniper
Cataloging metadata for the news article (left).

I found this strategy particularly helpful when working with a case related to a serial sniper who murdered multiple victims in Washington, D.C., in 1940. Three victims identified over the months of press coverage were Hylan McClaine, Lushion Sam Banks, and Theodore I. Goffney, but the chronological order of their murders was not shared. Press coverage of the sniper continued into the 1960s, long after the trial, with inconsistent reference to the victims. At the BNDA, we can link the victim names at the forefront of these articles in our catalog, centering the narrative around the victims rather than the perpetrator.

Bryant Family Murder
The research crucial work that aids in the cataloging effort is also on display in the case of the 1932 Bryant family murder. The news coverage of the tragic murder of the Bryant family was sometimes unclear about which family members survived and which were killed in the horrible robbery, torture, and death by arson. Some articles appeared sympathetic to the murderers and provided little to no details on the victims.

Our Airtable database supports a field for notes written by Project Historian Jay Driskell when they are available. Through Jay’s notes, I could confirm with certainty that the father and son, Lewis and Ozola Bryant, were murdered. The mother, Missouri Bryant, survived. The more detailed news articles corroborated these facts. The Bryant murder trial also stands out as a case that upheld the murder charges against a white killer despite appeals up to the Missouri State Supreme Court.

A screenshot titled "Ozola Bryant and Lewis Bryant in Mississippi in 1932" with a case summary and other categories of metadata
The BNDA incident page for the killing of Ozola and Lewis Bryant

Given the graphic nature of the emotional events and the polarized reporting, I was grateful to have ready, retrievable access to previous work to clarify the Bryant family’s story in order to help me accurately represent the family in the cataloged work. I also benefitted from the concurrent work of another archives assistant and the support of my supervisor, Project Archivist Joy Zanghi.

These cases and many more are available in BNDA Version 2.0 and you can browse the current version now. I had the privilege of working with archival methods developed over the past 18 years of the project, taking into account the humanity of the sensitive subject matter. The final result is that the CRRJ developed an archival format with the BNDA that allows for the data within it to be scalable, buildable, and retrievable for the future.

CRRJ Archives Assistant Stephanie Bennett Rahmat (she/her/hers) has 17 years of experience working with historic and cultural heritage resources throughout the U.S. She completed her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Simmons University in 2021, with a focus on Archives Management and Cultural Heritage. She came to work in the archives and libraries after a career in North American archaeology.

DRS Collection Profile: The Communications Photo Archive

Several students walk around campus paths on a sunny day. A white building with a sign that says "LISSER HALL" is in the background
A photograph of students on the Oakland campus, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20649629. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University. 

If you’ve seen pictures of campus happenings, then you’ve seen the hard work of the Northeastern University photographers. This team is responsible for documenting the day-to-day activity that takes place on Northeastern’s campuses, capturing everything from sporting events to researcher portraits to candid photos of students going about their day.

Matthew Modoono, Alyssa Stone, and many other photographers in the Communications Office have used their cameras to document life at Northeastern for decades. They have been recognized by the University Photographers Association of America, the National Press Photographers Association, and the New England Newspaper & Press Association, and have received several awards, including Picture of the Year and Photographer of the Year, for their tremendous skill and vision in the field of photography.

Library staff are responsible for archiving the printed photographs captured through 2010 (digitized copies are also available in the Northeastern University photograph collection (A103). Since 2010, we also help facilitate access to their digital collection in the Digital Repository Service’s Communications Photo Archive (access to the photographs in this collection are limited to Northeastern faculty and staff).

The Communications Photo Archive has served as a record of recent activity since 2015, when the Digital Repository Service first launched. Since then, the photographs stored in the collection (more than 172,000 at the time of this writing) have been viewed and downloaded approximately 400,000 times. The photographs can be seen in many places around the university, including websites, printed brochures, magazines, social media, and in the daily articles published in Northeastern Global News.

Screenshot of an article on a web page titled NGN News. The headline is "Punk rock and tacos: How a drummer turned real estate agent found restaurant success." Under the headline is a photo of a man wearing a black baseball cap and t-shirt shaking a yellow cocktail tumbler behind a bar.
A screenshot of an NGN article that features a photograph stored in the DRS, http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20533071

Photographs in the collection capture:

Graduates throw their caps in the air under a blue sky in Fenway Park. The Fenway Park sign is visible behind the caps
Students celebrate at the 2025 undergraduate commencement ceremony held at Fenway Park, https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20740045. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University.

Photographs of commencement make up a large portion of the collections, with about 20% of the 172,000 photos described using the terms “graduation” or “commencement.” In fact, some of the busiest days for uploading photographs to the DRS happen during the commencement season, with photographers regularly adding more than 1,000 photographs a day.

Although the photographs in this collection are only available to Northeastern faculty and staff, the collection regularly appears in the list of the top 10 most-used collections in the DRS — a testament to how important the photos are to the day-to-day work at the university.

Be sure to check the Communications Photo Archives regularly for the most recent photos of life at the university. You can sort search results by “Recently created” or “Recently updated” to view the most current shots. You may also click the “Recently added” button to sort the entire collection by the most recently uploaded images. The “Limit your search” button can be used to limit your results by the name of the photographer or the year the photograph was taken.

Contact me or my team for help using the DRS or finding photographs in the collection. Visit the Brand Center’s Photography page for information about the photographs and photographers, as well as how you can access the photographs and use them for university business.

And please enjoy some of my favorite photographs from the Communications Photo Archive: animals on the Boston campus!

A yellow/white dog wearings a graduation gown and cap.
https://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20732128, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A majestic hawk sits in a tree and looks to the left.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20236444, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A yellow/white dog wearing a blue birthday hat bites at a bubble in a field. The Boston city skyline is visible in the background
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20467241, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A small brown rabbit sits on some sticks.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20452354, Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University.
A bumble bee flies above a blue hydrangea
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20444529, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A white French bulldog wearing a blue harness swims in a pond next to some lily pads. The dog's eyes are closed and it looks very content
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20411840, Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
A gray squirrel sits on top of a pumpkin outside of a sliding door.
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20325749, Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University.
A white axolotl with red fins swims
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20252465, Photo by Adam Glanzman.

This post was written as part of a series celebrating 10 years of the DRS. Check out A Decade of the Digital Repository Service and What is the DRS and who is it for? to read more about the history of the DRS.

Special Collections Featured in ICA Boston Watershed Art Installation

A series of red and black threads hanging from the ceiling with folded papers suspended within. Two chairs also sit within the threads
Chiharu Shiota’s “Home Less Home” exhibit featuring reproductions of materials from the Archives & Special Collections. Photo courtesy of Molly Brown.

Reproductions from the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections are featured as a part of artist Chiharu Shiota’s “Home Less Home” exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston’s Watershed.

The installations will be on display until September 1.

“Home Less Home” creates the shape of a house with many red and black ropes hung from the ceiling. Suspended within the ropes are records of immigration, such as passports and immigration papers. ICA Boston’s iteration of the installation also draws specifically on Boston history, featuring archival records from institutions across the city that speak to the theme of home and the actions around home: finding a home, leaving home, protecting home, and creating a new home.

Northeastern’s archives brought a unique organizational activism component to the exhibit through our Special Collections’ focus on neighborhood social justice movements. Reference staff worked with ICA Boston curators to find records addressing housing activism and advocacy in Boston’s neighborhoods. The exhibit features records from the following collections:

Paper suspended amid red threads reading "Servicios Humanos"
Records from the Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción. Photo courtesy of Molly Brown.
Papers suspended within hanging red threads
Records from the Phyllis Ryan papers. Photo courtesy of Molly Brown.

















This installation is Shiota’s first in New England and is featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025. Check it out before September 1!

Using AI to Automate Library Captioning

Captions play a key role in making audio and video content accessible. They benefit not only deaf and hard-of-hearing users, but also second-language learners, researchers scanning interviews, and anyone viewing content in noisy environments.

At the Northeastern University Library, we manage a growing archive of media from lectures and events to oral histories. Manually creating captions for all of this content is not a scalable solution, and outsourcing the task to third party services can be expensive, time-consuming, and inconsistent. Motivated by this, we have been exploring AI-powered speech-to-text tools that could generate high-quality captions more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Screenshot of a video with a person speaking and a caption reading "There is an enormous need for an expansion of imagination and"
Figure 1: Example of an ideal transcription output

We started by testing Autosub, an open-source tool for generating subtitles. Even using a maintained fork (copies of the original project that add features, fix bugs, or adapt the code for different use cases), Autosub did not offer significant time savings, and it was eventually dropped.

In summer 2023, the team began using OpenAI’s Whisper, which immediately cut captioning time in half. However, it lacked key features like speaker diarization (the process of segmenting a speech signal based on the identity of the speakers), and it often stumbled on long stretches of music or background noise which would require extra cleanup and made the output harder to use at scale.

As the AI for Digital Collections co-op on the Digital Production Services (DPS) team, I was responsible for researching and testing Whisper forks that could be realistically adopted by our team. I tested model performance, wrote scripts to automate captioning, debugged issues, and prepared tools for long-term use within our infrastructure.

Phase 1: Evaluating Whisper Forks

We looked for a model that could:

  • Handle speaker diarization
  • Distinguish between speech and non-speech (music, applause, etc.)
  • Output standard subtitle formats (like VTT/SRT)
  • Be scriptable and actively maintained

We tested several forks, including WhisperX, Faster Whisper, Insanely Fast Whisper, and more. Many were either too fragile, missing key features, or poorly maintained. WhisperX stood out as the most well-rounded: it offered word-level timestamps, basic diarization, reasonable speed, and ongoing development support.

Phase 2: Performance Testing

Once we chose WhisperX, we compared its various models to OpenAI’s original Whisper models, including large-v1, v2, v3, large-v3-turbo, and turbo. We tested six videos, each with different lengths and levels of background noises, and compared the models based on Word Error Rate (WER) (how often the transcription differed from a “gold standard, or human-created or -edited transcript), and processing time (how long it took each model to generate captions).

WhisperX’s large-v3 model consistently performed well, balancing speed and accuracy even on noisy or complex audio. OpenAI’s turbo and large-v3-turbo delivered strong performance but lacked diarization features.

Phase 3: Timestamp Accuracy Evaluation

Next, we assessed how precisely each model aligned subtitles to the actual audio — crucial for usability. We compared outputs from the WhisperX large-v3 model and the OpenAI turbo and large-v3-turbo models.

We used a gold standard transcript with human-reviewed subtitles as our benchmark. For each model’s output, we measured:

  • Start Mean Absolute Error (MAE) — average timing difference between predicted and actual subtitle start times
  • End MAE — same as Start MAE, but for subtitle end times
  • Start % < o.5s — percentage of subtitles with start times less than 0.5 seconds off
  • End % < 0.5s — same for start % < 0.5s, for end times
  • Alignment rate — overall percentage of words correctly aligned in time

WhisperX’s large-v3 model outperformed all other models significantly. In most of our test videos, it showed:

  • Much lower MAE scores for both start and end timestamps
  • Higher percentages of accurately timed subtitles (within the 0.5-second range)
  • Better overall word alignment rates

In fact, in several test cases, WhisperX was nearly three times more accurate than the best-performing OpenAI Whisper models in terms of timing precision.

Coded two-page caption
Figure 2: WhisperX output vs. gold-standard transcript in a high-WER case

In one particular case, one WER result for WhisperX large-v3 showed a surprisingly disappointing score of 94% errors. When I checked the difference log to investigate, it was that the model had transcribed background speech that was not present in the gold standard transcript. So, while it was technically penalized, WhisperX was actually picking up audio that the gold standard did not include. This highlighted both the model’s sensitivity and the limitations of relying solely on WER for evaluating accuracy.

Figure 2 shows exactly that. On the left, WhisperX (denoted “HYP”) transcribed everything it heard, while the gold standard transcript (denoted “REF”) cut off early and labeled the rest as background noise (shown on the right).

What’s Next: Integrating WhisperX

We have now deployed WhisperX’s large-v3 model to the library’s internal server. It’s actively being used to generate captions for incoming audio and video materials. This allows:

  • A significant reduction in manual labor for our DPS team
  • The potential for faster turnaround on caption requests
  • A scalable solution for future projects involving large media archives

Conclusion

As libraries continue to manage growing volumes of audio and video content, scalable and accurate captioning has become essential, not only for accessibility, but also for discoverability and long-term usability. Through this project, we identified WhisperX as a practical open-source solution that significantly improves transcription speed, speaker diarization, and timestamp precision. While no tool is perfect, WhisperX offers a strong foundation for building more efficient and inclusive media workflows in the library setting.

Reflections and Acknowledgements

This project helped me understand just how much thought and precision goes into building effective captioning systems. Tools like WhisperX offer powerful capabilities, but they still require careful evaluation, thoughtful tuning, and human oversight. I am incredibly grateful to have contributed to a project that could drastically reduce the time and effort required to caption large volumes of media, this way enabling broader access and creating long-term impact across the library’s AV collections.

Finally, I would like to thank the Digital Productions Services team for the opportunity and their guidance and support throughout this project — especially Sarah Sweeney, Kimberly Kennedy, Drew Facklam, and Rob Chavez, whose insights and feedback were invaluable.

Box By Box: Inventorying the Boston Globe Big Dig Records

The Big Dig, a major infrastructure project that aimed to improve traffic flow, dominated the Boston area throughout its construction for 15 years and led to countless articles and columns in the Boston Globe. Former Globe reporters and editors Tom Palmer and Sean Murphy, who both worked at the newspaper for over 30 years, donated their extensive records to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections, providing a glimpse into the planning and construction of the Big Dig project. (NUASC holds multiple other collections relating to the Big Dig, as well.)

Aries Peralta, wearing a black jacket, gray baseball cap, and glasses, pulls a box off a shelf in the archives
Aries Peralta works in the Archives and Special Collections. Photo courtesy of Molly Brown

The initial planning of the Big Dig, officially named the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, began in 1982 and actual construction occurred from 1991-2006. The donated records contained articles by both Palmer and Murphy, as well as a third reporter, Charles Sennott.

I find this collection interesting because it is not just a compilation of articles published in the Boston Globe; it consists of the research and reference materials amassed for use in reporting on the issues surrounding the Big Dig. The records reveal the vast context and information a journalist would need to know in order to write cohesive articles, including contracts, technical reports, financial statements, photographs, maps, articles from other news sources, and more.

Below are some selected items to highlight the extent of the collection.

Big Dig Contract Map

Map of Boston with different colored lines representing streets and highways. Various area are labeled with contract numbers


The contracts in progress map is a snapshot of the various contracts happening at one time in downtown Boston and serves as a great visualization of the contracts’ physical locations. It also helps associate the technical contract number with the more publicly known name of any given section of the project, such as the Ted Williams Tunnel identified as contract number C07A1.

The Big Dig Blame Game

Illustrated graphic of a man standing behind a podium, with the neck and tongue of a snake. He is holding a megaphone and is surrounded by a red curtain and creepy clowns driving bumper cars, one of which is holding a shovel. A yellow banner at the top reads "The BIG Dig"


As Massachusetts Governor from 1997-2001, Paul Cellucci was the subject of countless voiced opinions about his tenure and leadership during the Big Dig project. This image of Cellucci as a snake accompanied an article published in a 2000 issue of Boston Magazine that suggested cost overruns were caused by a collective failure of key players, including Cellucci, for not properly managing the project.

A Fifth-Grader’s Opinion on the Big Dig

A piece of notebook paper with a letter written in a child's handwriting: "9/15/97 Dear Globe, I've never seen the big dig but I think it should help Boston. It is horrible traffic in Boston. If the big dig dosn't help it will seem like a wast of 10 billion dollars. Joey LeBlanc Medfield Ma. Dale St. School Grade 5"


Often stuck in traffic with their parents or simply by living in nearby neighborhoods, local students were also affected by the Big Dig project. The Student Newsline section in the Boston Globe presented an opportunity for students to send in their own opinions about the project. Many students offered their own ideas to quickly finish and reduce the costs of the project.

2006 Ceiling Collapse

A gloved hand holds a tape measure to a concrete ceiling, measuring the length of screws sticking down.
A worker stands in a crawlspace above the ceiling of a tunnel, surrounded by concrete and bars.












Reporting on the construction of the Big Dig included documenting tragedies. In 2006, a ceiling panel fell on a car in the Fort Point Channel Tunnel, killing a passenger and injuring the driver. Their family and the public wanted answers as to how the incident could have occurred. As a result, the Boston Globe undertook an in-depth investigation to report and provide answers. These photographs may have been taken to document the other ceiling panels in the rest of the tunnel after the accident occurred.

To learn more about accessing the Boston Globe Big Dig records, email the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Aries Peralta (he/him) recently graduated from Simmons University with an MS in Library and Information Science with a concentration in archives management. He received his BA in history from the University of Connecticut.