Friday 18 June 2024

The IFLA Information Technology and Preservation and Conservation sections, along with the Artificial Intelligence SIG, organized a webinar on the intersection of artificial intelligence and heritage and culture preservation in the context of libraries.

Robot in library shelves
AI for preservation

The great audience success shows how interesting the topic is: with 470 registrations from 59 countries, the event was nearly sold out! Up to 346 attendees participated live. In the words of Preservation and Conservation Section Chair, Ornella Foglieni, “This challenge requires strong investments for research and systematic management, not always available, but above all it requires great awareness and interdisciplinary skills, as well as joint actions at the various organizational levels of cooperation on collections and services for the best management of digital materials”.

Our keynote speaker William Kilbride (Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition) introduced the theme with a clear and dynamic presentation, whose slides are available here. He published a brilliant blog post to explain his point of view: https://www.dpconline.org/blog/dp-and-artificial-intelligence-a-4-point-plan

Moderated by Ray Uzwyshyn, the following panel provided interesting feedback on different use cases and analyses:

  • Herbert Menezes Dorea Filho (Brazil) gave a speech about: “Artificial Intelligence: Situational Analysis and Digital Preservation of Archives at UFBA” – Slides
  • Emanuelle Silva (Brazil) presented: “Using AI as Part of the Recreation Strategy in Digital Preservation” – Slides (prepared with Pablo Gobira)
  • Holly Chan (Hong Kong) showed: “Beyond Pixels: AI-driven Image Processing for Enhanced Contextualization of HKUST’s Digital Images (1988-2000s) through the Applications of AI Models for Image Tagging, Object Detection, and Facial Recognition” – Slides (prepared with Lau Ming Kit Jack)
  • Filippo Mengoni (Italy) presented: “Like Never Before: AI for Oral Sources. How ASR and LLMs Can Revolutionize Our View of Oral History” – Slides

The event is a milestone on the challenging exploration of the AI-leveraged cultural heritage preservation and conservation. As one of the follow-ups, articles by the presenters will be included in January 2025 TILT newsletter.

Replay webinar recording : https://youtu.be/JfUgNnF2Jws