Dean of FGV’s School of Social Sciences (CPDOC) joins FOIArchive advisory board

Professor Celso Castro, the Dean of FGV’s School of Social Sciences (CPDOC), was invited to join, for a term of two years, the newly created Advisory Board of the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) project, based at Columbia University. The project is led by History Department professor Matthew Connelly, in partnership with the university’s Libraries System. The initiative was recently awarded two grants from the Arcadia Fund and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

FOIArchive was created to help students, researchers, journalists and citizens in general explore the ever-expanding universe of “digital-born” or scanned public documents with tools developed using data science and advanced computing technologies. The initiative includes more than three million documents from various countries and eight different collections. Just as important, it also presents unique metadata derived from techniques such as topic modeling and recognition of named entities.

Although this is not a complete answer to the new challenges presented by collecting, curating and hosting digital content, the group believes that an approach focused on older and more important materials can serve as a proof of concept for more investment of material and human resources in the pursuit of long-term solutions. The FOIArchive also contributes to the way libraries can rethink their traditional role as repositories of information.

The Advisory Board shall establish policies and will supervise implementation in the areas of acquisition of collections, processing, terms of use, public disclosure and long-term preservation. Its members will act in the identification of new collections, the needs of researchers and in the evaluation of innovative research tools before they are publicly available.

Go to the website for more information on the FOIArchive.