Crowdsource-a-Mole: Adventures in Digital Archives

The Finnish National Library, like many other libraries, museums and archives around the world, is working to digitise some of their collections to make them more accessible and easily searchable. The trouble is that having a human being manually translate documents into a digital format would take a phenomenally long time, whereas computers and scanners don't have the capacity to evaluate whether what they have reproduced digitally makes sense. The vast digital collection therefore includes mistakes and anomalies, and fixing them can be time-consuming.

Sunday reading

I got Outi Heiskanen's Tehtävä Suomessa on interlibrary loan, although in that frustrating version that only allows access to the book inside the library. So I spent my Sunday afternoon  in the library, reading about Finland in films by non-Finns, such as Helsinki playing Moscow or St Petersburg during the Cold War.*