In “Beyond Keywords: AI-Mediated Access to the Islam West Africa Collection through an MCP Server and Agent Skill” (Eighth Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History), Frédérick Madore (University of Bayreuth) observes that “over the past two years, AI has transformed the development of the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 documents covering Muslim public life in six West African countries. Built and maintained by a single researcher without dedicated staff, IWAC now relies on LLMs for tasks that would otherwise require a full team: from OCR on degraded scans to named entity recognition. This paper turns to the next challenge: using AI not only to help process the collection, but to mediate access to it.”
