Unveiling the Archives: Digital Transformation and Accessibility in the European Parliament
About the EU Parliament. Written on September, 2021
Introduction
The European Parliament has been taking significant strides in recent years to improve access to its extensive archive of documents, which date back to its inception in 1952. These archives house more than five million records in both paper and digital formats, totaling an impressive four kilometers of physical material. These documents play a vital role in answering questions about the institution's evolution, its relationship with various stakeholders, such as researchers, legal professionals, and citizens, and a myriad of other inquiries. This essay aims to explore the digital transformation of the archives in depth, examining the innovative technologies being employed to enhance accessibility and elevate the overall user experience.
The European Parliament Archives: A Comprehensive Overview
The European Parliament's archives are tasked with the crucial responsibility of preserving and maintaining all written records produced since 1952. These five million records include both paper versions, which are stored in stockrooms within the European Parliament and the historical archives of the European Union in Florence, Italy, and digital transfers dating from 2016 onwards, which amount to roughly 809 gigabytes of data. The importance of these archives cannot be understated, as they serve as a fundamental resource for answering questions about the institution's evolution and various activities. On average, the archives receive and address 306 inquiries each year.
To ensure that the archives remain accessible, informative, and valuable to users, the Parliament has concentrated its efforts on making documents easily available and providing essential contextual information. This involves meticulously explaining the archive's content, structure, and transfer procedures, as well as outlining the historical context of the documents themselves, offering users a comprehensive understanding of the materials they are accessing.
Digital Transformation and Accessibility: Innovations and Improvements
In a bid to enhance accessibility and elevate the user experience, the European Parliament has implemented a conversational agent and a text summarizer to aid users in navigating the archives. The conversational agent, colloquially referred to as the "surfboard," is an interactive tool that employs natural language processing to assist users in exploring the archives. The surfboard allows users to access information about the archive's location, standards, and structure, as well as the available documents themselves. While the surfboard is currently only implemented in English, plans are underway to expand its availability to other languages in the near future.
The text summarizer is another invaluable tool that provides automatic summaries of long documents, enabling users to quickly determine a document's relevance to their needs before deciding to download the full version. This innovative service operates in over 100 languages and employs AI algorithms to extract the most important parts of the document, condensing it to approximately 10% of its original size. This feature ensures users can efficiently assess the relevance of documents without having to sift through copious amounts of information.
Artificial Intelligence in the Archives: Streamlining Processes and Enhancing Access
The European Parliament has wholeheartedly embraced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as a means of streamlining archive management and improving accessibility. The surfboard, for instance, uses AI for natural language processing, while the text summarizer relies on AI algorithms to create accurate, concise summaries. In addition, the Parliament is actively exploring the use of AI for optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic classification, as well as named entity recognition, in order to facilitate document searches in a more efficient and user-friendly manner. These AI-driven features are expected to be implemented by the first semester of next year and will operate independently of the original language of the document, ensuring widespread accessibility.
The ongoing digital transformation of the European Parliament archives represents a momentous step forward in making information more accessible and user-friendly for citizens, researchers, and other stakeholders. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing, the Parliament has successfully transformed the way it communicates and engages with users, allowing them to efficiently access and understand the vast troves of archived material.
The implementation of interactive tools like the surfboard and text summarizer has significantly improved the overall user experience and streamlined the process of locating relevant documents. As the European Parliament continues to expand the availability of these tools to more languages, accessibility will be further enhanced, ensuring that even more users can benefit from the wealth of information stored within the archives.
In addition to the current innovations, the European Parliament is committed to ongoing research and development in the field of AI-driven archive management. As advancements continue to be made, users can expect further improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of the archive system, making it even easier to access the information they seek.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the digital transformation of the European Parliament archives is a testament to the institution's dedication to transparency, accessibility, and the effective dissemination of information. By embracing modern technologies and continually evolving its approach to archive management, the European Parliament is ensuring that its wealth of historical records remains a valuable resource for generations to come, fostering a deeper understanding of the institution's evolution and the complex tapestry of its activities throughout history.