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Northeastern Library, Partners Receive Grant to Deliver AI-Enabled Access to Digital Books

For over a year, the Northeastern University Library has been actively exploring how to use artificial intelligence in ways that advance learning and research, prototyping and implementing helpful connections to library collections and related tools.

A significant gap in this work has been the lack of book collections, so we are thrilled to announce that we are part of a major new grant that will provide students, faculty, and the public with robust, noncommercial forms of AI access to the 19 million books that have been digitized and stored in the nonprofit HathiTrust.

Here is the official announcement of this grant from HathiTrust:

Researchers, students, and the broader public will have new paths into the HathiTrust collection thanks to a Mellon Foundation award to develop responsible, equitable, and transparent services that leverage AI for the public good and scholarly discovery. Two respected partners will join HathiTrust in this effort: Northeastern University Library, which brings deep expertise in digital scholarship, and Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that supports authors who want their work to benefit the public. With a firm commitment to lawful, noncommercial, public-interest uses, this project will make HathiTrust’s 19 million digitized volumes more useful and accessible to the academic community and the public.

Transparent Books: AI Infrastructure for Discovery and the Public Interest responds to the growing need for shared, trusted, academy-led infrastructure enabling sophisticated discovery and research of digitized collections. The project aims to connect readers to relevant titles more efficiently, thereby enhancing their reach and impact, and will consider a range of interests, including publishers, authors, scholars, and members of the public.

Over the course of the $5 million, 5-year grant, HathiTrust and its two grant partners will:

  • Enhance Book Discovery: Apply AI tools to the HathiTrust corpus to improve descriptive metadata (e.g., subjects, languages, summaries) and text quality, and to develop interactive search to facilitate deeper understanding of books, both as individual items and in aggregate.
  • Provide Verified Resources: Offer lawful, legitimate, verified, and transparent sources of text and images from books at scale for academic and noncommercial use cases, for purposes such as text mining, computational analysis, and the creation of specialized language models.
  • Advance Shared Principles: Develop principles for legal frameworks, research integrity, accountability, and environmental impact to serve as a shared foundation for decision-making that centers academic values and the public good.
  • Create Sustainable Services: Develop financially sustainable services that support academic and noncommercial research.

Mike Furlough, HathiTrust’s Executive Director, said, “For decades, libraries have sustained their values in the face of rapid and powerful advances in technology. Libraries created HathiTrust to ensure that the results of mass digitization would address the unique needs of researchers and the academy. This project continues that longstanding effort to collaboratively make the scholarly record more accessible and usable for today and into the future.”

Transparent Books also builds on the 2024-2026 Public Interest Corpus project, led by Authors Alliance and Northeastern University, which examined how research libraries can make book data available for computational research in lawful ways that serve the public interest rather than reinforce commercial control of large-scale digital collections. Through Transparent Books, HathiTrust will use the framework identified in the Public Interest Corpus project to deliver its corpus for noncommercial AI research and development.

Authors Alliance Executive Director Dave Hansen shared, “Our role in Transparent Books is to help articulate principles for use of the corpus, convene the authors, researchers, and institutions the project depends on so their views can be meaningfully reflected in the projects’ designs. Ultimately, we want to lower barriers for noncommercial, academic researchers so they can build models and tools that actually research and benefit the public.  And we want to see this happen in a way that ensures authors’ works and ideas are discovered, attributed, and built upon.”

The project will collaborate closely with academic libraries and researchers to address the complexities of applying artificial intelligence tools to scholarly collections. Creating a path to lawful, legitimate access to in-copyright books data without corporate mediation demands a deep understanding of libraries’ current use of AI tools and their aspirations to offer meaningful engagement with their collections for academic and public communities.

Dan Cohen, Dean of the Library and Professor of History at Northeastern University, highlighted, “Students, faculty, and members of the public who treasure books as rich sources for teaching and learning will value the new kinds of access and use this initiative will provide. At the Northeastern University Library, we have been thoughtfully integrating collections with AI tools to help readers find materials of interest and to enable advanced forms of research, and the lack of digitized books has been a major gap we aim to fill.”

Library Receives CPA Grant to Digitize “Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond)”

Black and white image of Elma Lewis writing at a desk while wearing a cap and gown
Elma Lewis at the New England Conservatory of Music where she was conferred an honorary degree in 1977

The Northeastern University Library is proud to announce that the Archives and Special Collections has been awarded a City of Boston Community Preservation Act (CPA) grant to fund the project Black Art and Joy in Boston (and Beyond): Elma Lewis and the National Center of Afro-American Artists. This grant of almost $460,000 will support the digitization, cataloging, and publication of primary source materials from four archival collections that document the extraordinary work of Elma Lewis (1921-2004) and the cultural institutions she founded.

Dan Cohen, Vice President for Information Collaboration and Dean of the Northeastern University Library, said, “The University Archives and Special Collections department carefully preserves and protects access to some of the deep history and stories of Boston’s Black community. This project will augment and complement their and the Library’s Digital Production team’s effort to digitize significant portions of the Freedom House’s historical collection. We are thrilled to partner with the City of Boston and the Community Preservation team on this project.”

Lewis was a transformative force who trained a full generation of African American dancers, singers, musicians, actors, and visual artists in Boston. She formed the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950 and established the National Center of Afro-American Artists in 1968, along with its museum in 1969. Her outsized influence on the Black arts movement in Boston, and how her ideas and techniques spread nationally and internationally, represents a crucial chapter in the city’s cultural history.

Black and white image of ballet dance class
A ballet class at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, 1975
A green program for the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Children's Theatre presentation of FACES (A Play with Music)
A program for a children’s play at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1981

This project amplifies the voices of those who were in Lewis’s orbit as teachers, collaborators, or students. It also highlights the influence of Afrocentric organizations on Boston, a necessary element to understanding Black civil rights work in the city and the rich network of organizations and individuals focused on community-building and empowerment.

The digitized collections will shed light on the decades of labor and coalition-building that are foundational to Boston’s existing Black arts infrastructure. By publishing them online, we make this history accessible to Bostonians at any time and for any purpose, while also reaching larger local and national audiences through participation in Digital Commonwealth and the Digital Public Library of America.

The curricular potential of this collection represents one of its most valuable forms of impact. The project will build on the successful Boston Public Schools Desegregation Collection, a collaboratively built collection of scanned archival materials documenting the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, in collaboration with the district itself. That project demonstrated how archival materials can be integrated into K-12 curriculum design, bringing primary source materials directly into classrooms across the city.

An archival box from the Elma Lewis collection, with a selection of photos and papers
A box of archival materials from National Center of Afro-American Artists records and some of its contents

These digital collections will enable Bostonians, including relatives and friends of those who appear in the collections, to access this evidence of their community’s rich cultural history. The materials will be freely available online, searchable, and integrated with our existing digital collections to provide a deeper and richer pool of resources illustrating the activities and accomplishments of Boston’s Black residents and leaders.

As we embark on this preservation effort, we honor not only Elma Lewis’s remarkable legacy but also the ongoing vitality of the Black arts movement in Boston that she helped establish. Through the CPA’s support, we ensure that future generations will have access to these invaluable records of creativity, resilience, and community building.

For more information about the project, please contact Giordana Mecagni at g.mecagni@northeastern.edu or 617-373-8318.

To learn more about what collections from Elma Lewis we hold, visit our research guide Finding Elma Lewis in the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.

This blog post was co-written by Giordana Mecagni, Head of Archives and Special Collections, and Molly Brown, Reference and Outreach Archivist.

Mellon Foundation Awards $350,000 Grant to Fund Plan for AI Book Training Commons

The Northeastern University Library and Authors Alliance have received a $350,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to plan a public-interest book training commons for artificial intelligence.

With the increasingly essential role that artificial intelligence plays in society, the importance of including information from books in AI’s large language models becomes more pivotal. The more than 129 million books written over the past 500 years are vital training data sources for AI, providing a quality, breadth, and diversity of content related to human thinking that can strengthen AI’s scope and accuracy.

The main goal of this project is to develop a plan for either establishing a new organization or identifying the relevant criteria for an existing organization (or organizations) to attempt the work of creating and stewarding a large-scale public interest training commons of books.

“We are grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s generous support for this important new project,” said Dean of the Library Dan Cohen. “We and the Authors Alliance are excited to convene writers, publishers, Librarians, technologists, and other stakeholders to explore the best way for books to be incorporated in an ethical and productive way that serves the public.”

Northeastern University Library’s role will be to support and coordinate the project and to host one of the two meetings of stakeholders.

With this work, planners hope to answer key questions, including:

  • What are the right goals and mission for such an effort, taking into account both the long and short-term;
  • What are the technical and logistical challenges that might differ from existing library-led efforts to provide access to collections as data;
  • How to develop a sufficiently large and diverse corpus to offer a reasonable alternative to existing sources;
  • What a public-interest governance structure should look like that takes into account the particular challenges of AI development;
  • How do we, as a collective of stakeholders from authors and publishers to students, scholars, and libraries, sustainably fund such a commons, including a model for long-term sustainability for maintenance, transformation, and growth of the corpus over time;
  • Which combination of legal pathways is acceptable to ensure books are lawfully acquired in a way that minimizes legal challenges;
  • How to respect the interests of authors and rightsholders by accounting for concerns about consent, credit, and compensation; and
  • How to distinguish between the different needs and responsibilities of nonprofit researchers, small market entrants, and large commercial actors.

The Authors Alliance is an organization focused on creating resources and opportunities for authors interested in sharing their work broadly, in the interest of the public good.

Research in the Archives: NERFC 2023-2024 Grant Applications Open

Archival photos, books, documents, and papers are spread around a round pink table. A hand on the left side of the frame points to one of the documents.
09/24/19 – BOSTON, MA. – A view of articles and photographs from Northeastern’s archive at Snell Library. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University

Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections is proud to be a member of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), which is a collaboration of 31 cultural institutions across New England.

The fellowship program’s aim is to promote research across a wide variety of institutions and regions in New England. NERFC grants at least two dozen awards every year. Fellows receive a stipend of $5,000 with the requirement that they conduct their research in at least three of the participating institutions for periods of two weeks each. The diverse group of institutions in NERFC offer research opportunities in collections that span the region’s time period, from pre–European contact to the present day. Past awards have funded research on a wide array of topics conducted by scholars and independent researchers from across the US.

As one of the participating institutions, we encourage you to apply to make use of our records documenting Boston’s history of social justice activism, neighborhoods and public infrastructure, as well as records from individuals and organizations part of the city’s African American, Asian American, LGBTQA, Latinx, and other communities and make connections between our records and other NERFC institutions’. 

Past NERFC fellows’ projects using Northeastern’s archival collections examined feminist health care centers, gay art and photography in 1970s Boston, links between socialist and feminist thought in Boston, and the history of Black intellectuals, to name a few. 

The Archives and Special Collections encourages researchers in the Northeastern community and beyond to apply to NERFC’s fellowship program by the February 1, 2023, deadline.

Have questions about how to get started? Email Reference and Outreach Archivist Molly Brown: mo.brown@northeastern.edu. 

To learn more about the application requirements and other participating institutions, please visit the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium website.

Mellon Foundation Awards $505,000 Grant to Extend Funding for the Boston Research Center

Boston Research Center logo

The Northeastern University Library has received a $505,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the final developmental phase of the Boston Research Center. This grant builds upon two previous grants from the Mellon Foundation — which helped Northeastern launch the BRC with a $200,000 planning grant in 2017, and a $650,000 implementation grant in 2019.

“We deeply appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s ongoing support of the Boston Research Center and our library’s efforts to work with the communities that surround Northeastern’s campuses,” said Dan Cohen, Dean of the Northeastern University Library. “Along with our partners in the Boston area, we have learned a great deal about how to express our neighbors’ stories, culture, and history.”

The BRC is dedicated to bringing Boston’s neighborhood and community histories to light through the creation and use of new technologies, allowing Boston residents to share underrepresented stories from city’s past. In its most recent phase, the BRC has focused on specific community projects to help share the stories of these neighborhoods and organizations. The Mellon Foundation’s grant will help develop tools and workflows to curate and disseminate these collections, making them accessible to the community and easy to build upon in future work.

By gathering documents, images, and personal narratives, and creating metadata for community resources, the BRC ensures that everything from public art and oral histories to important neighborhood sights are recorded to help disseminate area history and culture. Recent projects include:

  • The Harriet Tubman Memory House Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, flyers, architectural plans, and other digitized materials that tell the interwoven stories of Boston’s South End neighborhood, the United South End Settlements and Harriet Tubman House, gentrification, community action, and resilience.
  • The East Boston Memoir Project, which contains photographs, oral histories, newspapers, and other digitized materials that make available the history of East Boston.
  • The Neighborhood Public Art Project, which contains an interactive map documenting Boston’s rich and diverse history of public art.
  • The Chinatown Collections Project, which contains historical records documenting the people, organizations, and historical collections of Boston’s Chinatown in a bilingual database.

Located in Northeastern University Library, the BRC is managed by the Archives and Special Collections and the Digital Scholarship Group. It works in collaboration with the Boston Public Library along with many community organizations and individuals.