News
Staff attend CBHL conference
20 May 2026
Director T. D. Jacobsen, Assistant Director/Principal Data Curator J. Dustin Williams and Library/Bibliography Associate Helena Meier attended the 58th Annual Meeting of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, hosted by Longwood Gardens, 12–15 May 2026. Williams and Jacobsen presented "AI-enabled full-text discovery in the Hunt Institute Archives: Searching digitized archival materials at scale, including handwriting" about our Archives Text Discovery Platform public prototype that uses AI to enable full-text searching across nearly all publicly available digitized text in our archival collections, including handwritten material. Built to extend discovery beyond traditional archival description, the platform allows researchers to search the actual contents of letters, field notebooks, and other documents that would otherwise remain difficult to access through metadata alone. They will provide notes from the field in the fall issue of the Bulletin.
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About the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, a research division of Carnegie Mellon University, specializes in the history of botany and all aspects of plant science and serves the international scientific community through research and documentation. To this end, the Institute acquires and maintains authoritative collections of books, plant images, manuscripts, portraits and data files, and provides publications and other modes of information service. The Institute meets the reference needs of botanists, biologists, historians, conservationists, librarians, bibliographers and the public at large, especially those concerned with any aspect of the North American flora.
Media Contact:
Scarlett T. Townsend
412-268-7304
st19@andrew.cmu.edu
