The purpose of the HKU COVID-19 Digital Archives is to collect, preserve, and provide access to digitally born records related to COVID-19 created by The University of Hong Kong. It serves as a central repository for HKU produced digital materials, including scholarly articles, publications, and media presentations in different types of format.  

Data collection via APIs helps  gather essential information such as abstracts, subjects, authors, publish dates, and affiliations of HKU-related COVID-19 output. The data is crucial for constructing comprehensive research collections and digital archives . Additionally, APIs enable the extraction of relevant data for analysis, aiding in understanding the impact of HKU’s COVID-19 research through tools like GIS mapping and data analytics.

The HKU COVID-19 Digital Archives utilized AI technologies such as Azure OpenAI LLM for processing data, Named Entity Recognition (NER) for extracting information, and Natural Language Processing (NLP).  Additionally, the project incorporated AI functionalities like text summarization, information extraction,  question-answering, and chatbot development to enhance the digital archives’ capabilities and user interactions.