Digital Repository Service

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.

Adding Archival Materials to the Digital Repository

During the 2024-25 academic year, the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC) scanned 24,608 pages of archival materials for both in-person and remote researchers. This output has allowed NUASC to serve more researchers and broaden access to these primary sources by uploading them into the Digital Repository Service (DRS).

Black and white image of a woman wearing a dress and with her hair in a bun watching three dancers in a dance room. The dancers are visible behind her in a mirror
A photo from the National Center of Afro-American Artists records

Work to put these reference scans into the DRS began in 2023 with a backlog of scans from NUASC’s remote reference program. Archives staff understood the research value of readily available scans and wanted to make them more accessible to anyone, regardless of institutional affiliation or research goals. Uploading these files into the DRS was a collaborative effort between Metadata and Digital Projects Supervisor Drew Facklam, Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown, and Reference and Reproductions Archivist Grace Millet.

Once a workflow was developed to clean up and provide information about the files, collections were identified based on community and researcher needs, as well as the quantity of scans. As of June 2025, 14,226 pages of digitized materials have been ingested into the DRS. Reference scans have come from the:

Reference scans are completed at a lower resolution than scans used for publication, though they are still entirely legible and usable for research purposes. Another important difference between reference scans and other digitized materials in the DRS is the format of reference scans’ titles, which allow users a glimpse into the inner workings of archival organization.

The titles of these files contain the collection number, box number, folder number, and folder title.

File name of "M042_B019_F001_ElmaLewis2" Red arrows point to each section. "M042" is labeled "Collection #"; "B019" is labeled "Box #"; "F001" is labeled "Folder #"; and "ElmaLewis1" is labeled "Folder Title"

With this knowledge, anyone viewing these files can discern where they are located within NUASC’s collections. This allows for easy reference if a researcher might need to request a higher-quality scan of a specific item.

To learn more about what is available in the Digital Repository Service from NUASC, you can search our digitized collections or reach out to us at archives@northeastern.edu. The public services team is looking forward to continuing this expansion of access to collections stewarded by NUASC!

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.

Issue and Inquiry and Urban Confrontation: Two Radio Programs Covering Urban Issues in Uncertain Times

Two radio program collections available in the Digital Repository Service (DRS) — Issue and Inquiry and Urban Confrontation — document social progress and unrelenting difficulties within American cities in 1970-71. Airing on Northeastern University’s radio station WRBB, the programs were produced the university’s now-defunct Division of Instructional Communication. (Urban Confrontation noted that it ended in 1971 for financial reasons.)

Black and white image of two students sitting in a recording studio. They are wearing headphones and sitting at a table while surrounded by 1960s-era recording equipment
Students working in the WRBB (then WNEU) radio station in 1969. Photo courtesy of Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

Episodes were primarily hosted by Joseph R. Baylor and feature interviewees from across the United States discussing wide-ranging topics. From the threat of nuclear warfare to the farm labor rights movement, from the “longhair” youth subculture to de-facto school segregation, these episodes present a sweeping view of both common anxieties and optimistic ideas about the future of city life.

As a metadata assistant in Digital Production Services, I performed a survey of the episodes and their associated metadata records. This helped me understand how descriptive information should appear in the DRS. For example, I investigated how titles, creators, subjects, and abstracts should be recorded for each episode. Next, I created an editing plan, performed batch edits, and carefully listened to each episode. As I listened, I recorded accurate information about the episodes so it could be updated in the DRS.

I selected two interesting episodes to highlight here, but be sure to check out the full collection for more episodes.

Oil in Santa Barbara: The Pollution Tragedy (Issue and Inquiry, Episode 10)

In this episode from 1970, Al Weingand, Bob Solan, and Dick Smith discuss a Union Oil offshore drilling well explosion that occurred on January 28, 1969, expelling two million gallons of uncontrolled oil into Santa Barbara Channel off the coast of California. Topics include the oil’s effect on tourism, local economy, wildlife, fishing, and environmental safety concerns.

Weingand, a Santa Barbara resident and former California legislative member, explains that no other disasters can compare to the devastation of the oil pollution. Smith, a reporter for the Santa Barbara News Press, calls for greater investment in tourist value of beaches, saying that offshore oil well spills are dangerous both environmentally and economically. Solan, another reporter for the News Press, covers the psychological benefits of beautiful surroundings for Santa Barbara residents.

This episode was produced in a time of evolving standards for environmental safety and presents an intimate view of lives affected by oil pollution.

Afro-American Culture: The Black Artist Unchained (Urban Confrontation, Episode 11)
Elma Lewis, a Black woman with dark hair in a bun, stands in front of flowers with a huge smile on her face. Her hands are clasped over her chest.
Elma Lewis candid. Courtesy of the National Center of Afro-American Artists records (M42) at Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

“The business that I am about is resurrecting that dormant conscious pride that Black people have had and should have.” — Elma Lewis (4:57)

In this episode, airing in 1970, arts educator and activist Elma Lewis discusses the intertwined histories of Black labor and Black cultural impact in America. She speaks critically of modern art because she says it lacks a basis in life experience. This, Lewis explains, is why Black contributions to American culture transcend art and extend to labor and life experience, which has formed the basis of American society. Throughout the program, Baylor asks Lewis to respond to common racist comments about Black culture. Despite Baylor’s insistence that Lewis speak to his white audience, she intentionally denies this request. Laughing, she replies, “I don’t answer nonsense. I’m not in the business of answering nonsense.”

For more information on Elma Lewis, explore the DRS. More materials from the Elma Lewis collections (Elma Ina Lewis papers, Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts records) are expected to be available in the DRS in 2026.

I wanted to highlight these two episodes because they made me think deeply about both everyday problems and large socio-political injustices which continue to affect us today. “Oil in Santa Barbara” presents opinions from concerned community members in California. It focuses on their reaction to environmental pollution, showing common anxieties about business success, health, and the beauty of their local natural environment. By contrast, “Afro-American Culture” features distinguished Black arts educator Elma Lewis. She discusses fine arts movements, while also celebrating Black joy and artistry in the face of wide-scale systemic racism.

I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to help make these shows available in the DRS. Both Issue and Inquiry and Urban Confrontation hold potential research value for those interested in viewing snapshots of American life in the early 1970s.

Chelsea McNeil served as a part-time metadata assistant in Digital Production Services.

What is the DRS and who is it for?

What is the DRS?

The Digital Repository Service (DRS) is an institutional repository that was designed by the Northeastern University Library to help members of the Northeastern community organize, store, and share the digital materials that are important to their role or responsibilities at the university. This can include scholarly works created by faculty and students; supporting materials used in research; photographs and documents that represent the history of the community; or materials that support the day-to-day operations of the university.

While the DRS itself is a technical system that stores digital files and associated information to help users find what they need, we also consider the DRS to be a service for the university community: library staff are here to help you organize, store, share, and manage the digital materials that have long-lasting value for the university community and beyond.

Result listing in the DRS for a report titled "Exploring the Effectiveness of Bite-Sized Learning for Statistics via TikTok" and includes metadata and an image of the report
Published research from the Northeastern community available in the DRS.

Northeastern is not alone in this endeavor. Repository services are now standard practice for most academic institutions, including Harvard University Library (who also use the name “Digital Repository Service”), Stanford University Library (a leader in technical development for repository systems), Tufts Libraries, and other institutions around the world.

Who uses the DRS?

The DRS has been used by faculty, staff, students, and researchers from all corners of the university community for 10 years. There are too many use cases to mention in one brief blog post, but here are some trends we’ve seen in what users choose to deposit the last few years.

Data visualization from a research publication, containing multiple styles of data depiction
Fang, D., et.al. Bottom-up estimates of floor area and embodied carbon patterns in the US building stock. Presentation.
  • Open access copies of research publications, as well as working papers and technical reports
  • Publications and data that supports published research
  • Event recordings, photographs, newspapers, and almost any kind of material you can think of to support the day-to-day operations and activity at the university
  • Student research projects and classwork, like oral histories and research projects. Students are also required to contribute their final version of their thesis or dissertation.
  • Digitized and born-digital records from the Archives and Special Collections, including photographs, documents, and audio and video recordings

These files, and all the other audio, video, document, and photograph files in the DRS, have been viewed or downloaded 11.2 million times since the DRS first launched in 2015. Nearly half of the files in the DRS are made available to the public and are therefore available for the wider world to discover. Materials in the DRS have been cited in reporting by CNN, Pitchfork, WBUR, and Atlas Obscura, among others, and are regularly shared on social media or in Reddit threads. As a result, Northeastern continues to contribute the work produced here to the larger scholarly and cultural record, and to the larger world.

Who supports the DRS?

The day-to-day work managing, maintaining, and supporting users of the service comes from staff in Digital Production Services:

  • Kim Kennedy supervises the digitization of physical materials and processing of born-digital and digitized materials.
  • Drew Facklam and Emily Allen create and maintain the descriptive metadata that helps you find what you need.
  • And all of us in the department, including part-time staff, are responsible for general management of the system, including batch ingesting materials, holding consultations and training sessions, answering questions, and leading conversations about how to improve the system and the service.
Two people stand in front of a presentation with a screenshot of the DRS behind them
Sarah Sweeney and David Cliff, DRS staff, posing in 2015 with the homepage of the recently launched DRS. 

The DRS is also supported by a number of library staff members across the library:

  • David Cliff, Senior Digital Library Developer in Digital Infrastructures, is the DRS’ lead developer and system administrator.
  • Ernesto Valencia and Rob Chavez from the Library Technology Services and Infrastructure departments also provide development support and system administration.
  • Many librarians in the Research and Instruction department do outreach about the service and support faculty as they figure out how to use it in their work.
  • Jen Ferguson from Research Data Services also connects faculty and researchers to the DRS, while also providing data management support for those wishing to use the DRS to store their data.
  • Members of the library administration, including Dan Cohen, Evan Simpson, Tracey Harik, and the recently retired Patrick Yott have contributed their unwavering support and advocacy for developing and maintaining system an service.

We are all here to help you figure out how the DRS may be used to make your work and academic life easier. To dive deeper into what the DRS is and how to use it, visit the DRS subject guide or contact me or my team.

The library is celebrating 10 years of the DRS! Check out A Decade of the Digital Repository Service to read more about the history of the DRS.