Josh Hadro

Josh Hadro

@hadro.bsky.social

Librarian and digital scholarship/data person working in cultural heritage. Also a former journalist and current local journalism booster in #Brooklyn / #NYC I work for the largest library in the world but all skeets and thoughts here are my own

1K followers1K following597 posts

Josh Hadro reposted

Chris Goldammer
@floorarearatio.bsky.social

Replying to @hadro.bsky.social

Fascinating and beautiful indeed! It looks like there's some overlap for the bigger structures. The city changes slowly! bsky.app/profile/floo...

Chris Goldammer@floorarearatio.bsky.social

Note: The key word is *building*, this is excluding structures consisting of buildings. If we look at all buildings, we get baseball fields and airports. This one is not to scale.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Many people are asking

Hell Gate *subscribe today!*@hellgatenyc.com

Is is OK to do a coup after a judge ordered leaders not to do a coup if the judge said you're not a leader when it struck down your prior coup effort? hellgatenyc.com/bk-dems-cont...

hellgatenyc.comIs It Ok To Do a Coup After a Judge Ordered Leaders Not To Do a Coup if the Judge Said You’re Not a Leader When It Struck Down Your Prior Coup Effort?Only the subtlest legal minds will grasp the big questions as the Brooklyn Dems legal battle returns to court.
Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

This is fabulous local history about, IMO, the best train in Brooklyn

The New York Groove@nygroove.nyc

did you know the Franklin Ave. shuttle used to connect to the beach AND to a brewery a block away from Ebbetts Field? AND that it's been saved from death time and time again by its neighbors and fans? read on for the toot scoot's surprisingly drama-filled backstory nygroove.nyc/franklin-ave...

nygroove.nycToot, scoot & boogie: The Franklin Avenue shuttle survives thanks to its fansBrooklyn's little train that could is getting a well-deserved party.

Josh Hadro reposted

mia ridge
@miaout.bsky.social

5400 articles published between 1835 and 1920 from over British 20 newspaper titles with metadata, crowdsourced labels (annotations) and fresh OCR doi.org/10.23636/xrk... Described at livingwithmachines.ac.uk/the-how-did-...

livingwithmachines.ac.ukThe ‘How did machines change accidents?’ dataset documentationDocumenting the crowdsourced ‘Language of Accidents’ dataset created by the Living with Machines project in collaboration with Zooniverse [...]
Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Shout out to a guy named Julio in Bushwick who helped my wife jumpstart a dead battery just now. Grateful for all the kind strangers like Julio in NYC!

Josh Hadro reposted

Rachel Holliday Smith
@rachelholliday.bsky.social

I've been thinking about this guide for months, and I'm so happy it's now published. NYC parents: you probably already know that school admission season started this week! myself and the AMAZING @chalkbeat.org team create this guide for you! [🧵]

thecityreporter.nycHow to Vet a Public School in New York CityChoosing an NYC school for your child? Here’s what to look for and what questions to ask, according to education journalists at Chalkbeat and The City Reporter.
Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Today in OCR/HTR fun: I'm working with entity extraction over an HTR corpus, and the entity extraction differentiated between versions of the term with and without a superscript "t" -- so "War Dept" and "War Dep<sup>t</sup>" are different entities. Attached image is the latter, in different hands.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Elder millennials love waxing nostalgic about printing out MapQuest directions, but 1917 has us all beat: people bought books of fun drives that helped them navigate an era before named highways, let alone interstate highways. Here’s the 1917 Automobile Blue Book 1917 vol 3 trip from NYC to Philly

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Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Also fun fact: the first step in this drive is to take a ferry across the Hudson from 42nd St to Weehawken ferry terminal, which replaces the Lincoln Tunnel drive people would do now

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

I broke this story in 2011, about the first major publisher-imposed loan restrictions on ebooks (the only truly big story of my trade journalism career). It’s been 15 years, and the only major difference is that public library budgets are lower and what publishers charge libraries has gone up.

libraryjournal.comHarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations
Melanie Walsh@mellymeldubs.bsky.social

In this powerful piece on libraries, this comment stuck out. I went to ALA for the first time this year, and I was struck by the prominent presence of corporate vendors, many of which are sucking libraries dry… www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Fun fact: I also posted this on LinkedIn, but over there it has escaped containment and I'm now getting a stream of tech industry dudes sharing their one-shot VLM output and saying all it needs is "a good prompt." 🙄

Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social

You: "OCR is a solved problem" Me:

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Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

3.) Not hallucinate plausible text into the page in a way that's almost impossible to detect 4.) Not get itself into VLM OCR psychosis when it encounters a run of dot leaders or dashes 5.) Provide line-level bounding boxes

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

6.) Do this more or less cleanly at a scale of millions of pages and finally, 7.) do this at a service level cost that is at all feasible

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Fun fact: I also posted this on LinkedIn, but over there it has escaped containment and I'm now getting a stream of tech industry dudes sharing their one-shot VLM output and saying all it needs is "a good prompt." 🙄

Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social

You: "OCR is a solved problem" Me:

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

I have yet to see a VLM that can do the following: 1.) handle the entire page at this level of complexity, on what are often degrades page scans, not just clean clips: tile.loc.gov/image-servic... 2.) Preserve the reading order, or at least not jumble it beyond recognition

Josh Hadro reposted

Melanie Walsh
@mellymeldubs.bsky.social

You can make flipbook GIFs 🤩 Play with it here: hadro.github.io/flipbook/#m=...

Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social

How do you show a whole digitized book in one thumbnail? Modern books have illustrated covers, but in research collections the cover is often a plain library binding. So I made Flipbook: hover over a book from any #IIIF source and flip through its pages. hadro.github.io/flipbook/ #GLAMsky 📚📜

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

How do you show a whole digitized book in one thumbnail? Modern books have illustrated covers, but in research collections the cover is often a plain library binding. So I made Flipbook: hover over a book from any #IIIF source and flip through its pages. hadro.github.io/flipbook/ #GLAMsky 📚📜

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Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Digital libraries over the years have tried to solve this in a bunch of ways, and I go into that in the blog post above. I also tell a fun little memory lane story from during my time in NYPL Labs of how we tried to come up with generative ebook covers for a large corpus of public domain works.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

And for the sake of full disclosure and transparency, the blog post is 100% human written the old fashioned way, by me, but Claude Code generated nearly all the code, and also was surprisingly helpful in creating the screen recording in the first skeet (Claude really knows how to use FFmpeg!)

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

How do you show a whole digitized book in one thumbnail? Modern books have illustrated covers, but in research collections the cover is often a plain library binding. So I made Flipbook: hover over a book from any #IIIF source and flip through its pages. hadro.github.io/flipbook/ #GLAMsky 📚📜

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

The backstory is here: hadro.github.io/blog/flipbook/ It's inspired by an Internet Archive feature from ~2013 where book thumbnails cycled through pages from inside each volume. Not everyone loved the feature, and it didn't last long, but it stuck with me.

hadro.github.ioHow Do You Represent a Book with a Single Image?The first page of a digitized book is often its least interesting one. A look at how digital libraries have tried to pick a better thumbnail, and Flipbook, a small tool that revives the Internet Archi...
Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Happy to report that the 5yo has no problem answering the question, “what is it like to be a bat?” Checkmate, philosophy 101, next problem please 🦇

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

If you believe that libraries should be allowed to buy books and lend them out, then you also believe in the First Sale doctrine, for better or for worse

Tim Carmody@tcarmody.bsky.social

Some people cannot tolerate any physical violence to books but imo if you bought it it’s yours

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Fun fact, I am working on a fun work project that has an output sorta like this. Don’t worry, it’s a dataviz, not a national library wet lab

Grace@gracekind.net

This is complete vibecoded slop, I’m sorry

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Library friends (📚📜): I'm seeking examples of digitized books where the "cover image"/first image of the work poorly represents the contents — e.g. maybe there's boring cloth binding that shows as the first image, hiding something like Audubon illustrations just a bit deeper inside. Any examples?

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

😻🗺️📜📚

Bert Spaan@bertspaan.nl

I've made an interactive map for exploring the terrain of the world! It uses @mapterhorn.com data and tiles, and WebGL for dynamic colors and animations. relief.bertspaan.nl/world?lang=en

Josh Hadro reposted

Daniel van Strien
@danielvanstrien.bsky.social

The Europeana Newspapers dataset on @hf.co now has an `alto` config: the raw ALTO XML for all 5.9M pages. The coordinates for every word, line and block, per-word OCR confidence and font info that the flattened text dropped are back. huggingface.co/datasets/biglam/europeana_newspapers

huggingface.cobiglam/europeana_newspapers · Datasets at Hugging FaceWe’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

What’s your location-specific delusion? I know I could not win a fight against a chimpanzee, and I doubt I could land a plane, but based on no evidence or experience whatsoever I still feel positive I could pilot an East River ferry safely to port if circumstances called.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

A true galaxy brain marketing maneuver: Brooklyn Public Library adding a free ebook PSA onto the end of the Jury Duty orientation video Well played @bklynlibrary.bsky.social! Love the suggestion to visit the nearby Center for Brooklyn History as well.

Josh Hadro reposted

Jim Casey
@jimccasey1.bsky.social

We've made a lot of progress on OCR + HTR, but nothing breaks a layout parser like Cattle Text Recognition (CTR)

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Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

If I had a time machine, after I finished all the moral imperative work etc etc., I would go back to 1930s-1950s and figure out how to be a fly on the wall for all the conversations about microfilming library collections to try and grok how it all went down

Josh Hadro@hadro.bsky.social

And once you get into tight multi column pages of city directories, phone books, and more? With indents and ditto marks and ads that cut across columns etc? Digitized from sketchy microfilm? Yowza. Still, fun problems to work on!

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

With new VLM OCR models ushering in an OCR renaissance of sorts, it's time to once again laugh at the fact that many of the challenges for OCR with historical cultural heritage materials are actually challenges of layout recognition & segmentation, which are often harder to solve than the OCR itself

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

You could OCR this page in 2013 just fine — but would the word order be useable? Even now, it’s not simple! That one ad box that cuts across two columns is a beast.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

And once you get into tight multi column pages of city directories, phone books, and more? With indents and ditto marks and ads that cut across columns etc? Digitized from sketchy microfilm? Yowza. Still, fun problems to work on!

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

“For anyone who needs reminding: The ability to do this is, and has always been, the promise of open data.” This could apply to basically every useful and interesting thing I’ve done in my career!

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

Spent the last few days at #ff2026 talking about neat advancements in OCR technology, among other things. Here’s a pic of 2016 me showing the time I used GNU parallels to chain together 10 computers in NYPL Labs over LAN to do mass distributed tesseract jobs. I basically created an OCR botnet.

Josh Hadro
@hadro.bsky.social

I look like I’m delivering a sermon but really I’m talking about the nerdiest possible uses of things like travel guides and city directories

Martin R. Kalfatovic@udcmrk.bsky.social

A few photos from the @iiif.bsky.social & @netpreserve.bsky.social "All Eyes on AI for LAMs" a pre conference event for #fantasticfuture26