Statement on AI

Statement on AI

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is transformative for scholarly research and academic teaching. Globally, these sectors are being shaped by increasing digital innovation and technological changes. At BOA, we understand how AI has a role in aiding digital publishing, enhancing historical primary source document research, assisting with content and collection creation, and optimising user experiences on our website. As AI continues to alter how researchers, academics, students, and libraries engage with digital sources and online material, we too are developing AI tools to aid our work. This includes formulating enriched metadata information to assist search engine functionality, integration, and workflow navigation. We are also building stronger search tool systems that support our Editorial team and user accessibility.

In particular, we utilise AI products to increase our use of handwritten document transcription software and enhanced keyword search functionality – this includes the use of packages such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on some of our collections. OCR provides computer generated text data that highlights the single/multiple term(s) being searched for on some of our documents through an automated process. Its ever-improving accuracy is dependent on the quality of the documents being assessed, and the programme's ability to 'read' different forms of text transcription (often varying between typed and handwritten material).

We are acutely aware of ongoing ethical debates surrounding AI's transparency and issues of safe usage. We do not use AI to generate material that users see in relation to the written descriptions, contextual essays, resource materials, collection information, and editorial insights on our website. Nor are we using AI to help create any of the images and digital primary sources on the site. We are also not using any customer or analytical data to train third-party artificial intelligence language models (LLMs). We believe firmly in monitoring educational and publishing discussions around AI ethics, accountability, bias, legal and privacy issues, environmental impacts, and data-sharing concerns. We will continue to update our AI policies on a regular basis in response to continual sector developments.