Research Support Partnership in Action: Community Engagement and Skills Development Through Guided Transcribathons

When research support requests range from Norwegian medical journals to Tibetan sacred manuscripts to 19th-century Arabic periodicals, no standard tutorial can cover everything. The University of Oslo Library's answer is the Transcribathon: a full-day, hackathon-style event where participants work together to build ground truth for new HTR models or produce publication-ready transcriptions, guided by Transkribus experts and subject specialists. This poster shares lessons from two events — one creating ground truth for a specialised Arabic HTR model, one testing general-purpose models on multilingual Norwegian historical letters — and what they reveal about making informed AI choices in research practice.