Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Ying-Hsiang, Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Ying-Hsiang
Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain
author_facet Huang, Ying-Hsiang
Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain
contents We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital collections. Our Digital Collections Explorer can be installed locally and configured to run on a visual collection of interest on disk in just a few steps. Building upon recent advances in multimodal search techniques, our interface enables natural language queries and reverse image searches over digital collections with visual features. This paper describes the system's architecture, implementation, and application to various cultural heritage collections, demonstrating its potential for democratizing access to digital archives, especially those with impoverished metadata. We present case studies with maps, photographs, and PDFs extracted from web archives in order to demonstrate the flexibility of the Digital Collections Explorer, as well as its ease of use. We demonstrate that the Digital Collections Explorer scales to hundreds of thousands of images on a MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. Lastly, we host a public demo of Digital Collections Explorer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00961
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections
Huang, Ying-Hsiang
Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain
Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
We present Digital Collections Explorer, a web-based, open-source exploratory search platform that leverages CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) for enhanced visual discovery of digital collections. Our Digital Collections Explorer can be installed locally and configured to run on a visual collection of interest on disk in just a few steps. Building upon recent advances in multimodal search techniques, our interface enables natural language queries and reverse image searches over digital collections with visual features. This paper describes the system's architecture, implementation, and application to various cultural heritage collections, demonstrating its potential for democratizing access to digital archives, especially those with impoverished metadata. We present case studies with maps, photographs, and PDFs extracted from web archives in order to demonstrate the flexibility of the Digital Collections Explorer, as well as its ease of use. We demonstrate that the Digital Collections Explorer scales to hundreds of thousands of images on a MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. Lastly, we host a public demo of Digital Collections Explorer.
title Digital Collections Explorer: An Open-Source, Multimodal Viewer for Searching Digital Collections
topic Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00961