The Institutional Data Initiative (IDI) is a groundbreaking program incubated at LIL that is helping libraries, government agencies, and other knowledge institutions share digital collections with their patrons while improving the accuracy and reliability of AI tools for all.
IDI was developed by Greg Leppert at LIL, and has now spun off into its own project under the Harvard Law School Library umbrella. Greg is the Executive Director, leading IDI as it seeks redefine the creation and stewardship of the knowledge and datasets that define AI research.
It prioritizes the assembly and release of open access public domain materials, as well as using principles developed at LIL for approaching large scale data with a library lens. In this way it is acting as a bridge between model makers and knowledge institutions.
Following in the footsteps of LIL’s Caselaw Access Project, the foundational dataset of IDI will be nearly one million public domain books, created thanks to the wide-ranging resources and expertise of the Harvard Library system.
Our mission to bring library principles to technological frontiers is embedded in the work of IDI. One of the goals of our lab is to incubate bold ideas and give them the resources to grow - IDI is an example of that.
IDI is the largest project to come out of LIL’s Democratizing Open Knowledge program.