C.F.W. Coker Award: JSTOR Seeklight

JSTOR Seeklight, the AI-powered collections processing technology within JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, is the 2025 recipient of the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative developments in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must set national standards, represent a model for archives description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.

Developed by JSTOR—part of ITHAKA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing access to knowledge—in collaboration with archivists and librarians, JSTOR Seeklight addresses fundamental challenges in archival description. It integrates advanced AI models, JSTOR’s infrastructure and engineering, and archivist expertise to support a human-in-the-loop approach that keeps the generated metadata contextually grounded and ethically sound. This enables practitioners to create and refine rich metadata and collection intelligence at scale. By offering intuitive tools and workflows for reviewing, enhancing, and augmenting system-generated description, JSTOR Seeklight helps drive discoverability and illuminate connections while balancing the many roles of archivists as data stewards. As part of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services—which also provides cloud-based digital asset management, long-term preservation via Portico, and pathways for discovery and usage—JSTOR Seeklight contributes to a holistic platform for end-to-end collection stewardship. By sustaining archivists’ central role in interpretive and decision-making processes, JSTOR Seeklight models a future for descriptive archival work that responds to contemporary challenges of scale, discoverability, and equity.

JSTOR Seeklight is a notable example of innovative and forward-thinking development within archival description. As one reviewer noted, "AI tools like named entity recognition are already prevalent in professions managing large metadata sets.... Our field must embrace all methods of archival description, and this project is a good example of innovative development in archival description." Merging archival principles, technological innovation, and a commitment to sustainable stewardship, JSTOR Seeklight exemplifies the award’s criteria.

Established in 1984, the award honors SAA Fellow C.F.W. Coker.