Joshua Gomez
Head of Software Development & Library Systems
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles Library recently created a small subteam dedicated to conducting strategic software development experiments. This presentation is a review of our first experiment, MGAP, in which we built a prototype event-driven digital library whose images were harvested via IIIF protocols, annotated via the Web Annotations protocol using tags from computer vision services like Amazon Web Services Rekognition, Google Vision, and Clarafai. These machine-generated annotations were automatically merged into the search index of the prototype interface. We then conducted moderated and unmoderated user testing to evaluate whether the tags from these services actually improved the user experience of the digital library.