DPC Reading Club - Searching Digital Collections

Check your local time for the event here.

DPC Reading Club in March 2026 will be hosted by our Head of Good Practice, Garth Stewart. Garth will be joined by Meghan Lyon, Senior Digital Collections Specialist at Library of Congress.

We’re excited to bring a paper to Reading Club which captures the background, technical elements, and future path of a brand-new search engine for digital collections. Readers will learn about the context on which the ‘GovScape’ tool was conceived – the 2020 End of (US Presidential) Term Web Archive - and the challenges the developer team faced in layering ‘multimodal’ search functions onto a large digital corpus.

Complete with a healthy dose of technical detail and costings, this compact paper could be of use for anyone considering new access functions for their service, or for those with an interest in web archives, file formats or access more generally. We’d love to hear your views and chat more at Reading Club!

[2511.11010] GovScape: A Public Multimodal Search System for 70 Million Pages of Government PDFs by Kyle Deeds, Ying-Hsiang Huang, Claire Gong, Shreya Shaji, Alison Yan, Leslie Harka, Samuel J Klein, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Mark Phillips, Trevor Owens, and Benjamin Charles Germain Lee

When reading the article, have a think about the following questions which we will discuss together:

• What did you learn from the article? Was it an interesting read?

• Was there anything that surprised you in the article …or was there perhaps something that you disagreed with?

• Do you think you will do anything differently as a result of reading this article - does it change your practices or thinking in any way?

• Is there anything we should do as a community or the DPC could help with?

Any other observations or discussion points also welcome!

More information about Reading Club (and a reading list so you can catch up on anything you've missed) can be found here.

Registration

This will be a small and informal event for DPC Members only and places are limited. Sign up now to secure your place! We only ask that you have done the reading that has been set before the event and bring along your thoughts and observations to share.

Places for DPC members will be restricted to five places for full members and one place for associates on a first come, first served basis. If you find you are no longer able to attend, please let us know in advance so we can free up your space to those on the waiting list.

DPC Members, please log in to register.

If you are having any issues registering, please contact eleanor.oleary@dpconline.org 

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.