Rediscovering Archives - Using LLM's for the Transcription and Extraction of Ecological Data from Historical Archives

What this was about

Phoebe Santos presented master's research (NHM, ZSL, UCL) testing whether a single LLM transcription approach generalises across different historical record types. Using British Library colonial-era India records and NHM mammal osteology table records, a closed-weight Claude Sonnet model and open-weight Qwen 2.5-VL 32B were prompted to classify page structure (text, mixed, table) and transcribe while preserving structure, with zero-, one- and few-shot and dataset-specific examples. Both did well on text; Claude was significantly better especially on tables and was robust to prompting, while Qwen improved with more and dataset-specific examples.

Why it matters. Evidence that LLM transcription is a viable, affordable route to unlocking historical ecological archives.

In the room

• Goal: test generalisation of one approach across collections with different handwriting, format and structure.
• Structure matters for meaning; models often failed to reproduce page formatting.
• Datasets: British Library 18th-19th century British Colonial Office India records; NHM handwritten mammal osteology tables.
• Models: Claude Sonnet (closed weights) and Qwen 2.5-VL 32B (open weights), temperature 0.7, no other changes.
• Prompt asks the model to classify each page as text, mixed or table and apply matching structure instructions.
• Both good on text; Claude significantly better (small absolute gap) and much better on structured records; Claude consistent across prompting; Qwen improved with more, dataset-specific examples.
• Claude costs suggested LLM transcription may be cheaper than commercial services; limitations: only English, left-to-right scripts.

Notable moments