This April’s teleconference from UMaine’s Digital Curation program looks at the practical and ethical issues of integrating AI into archival workflows—and how human crowdsourcing can fill in the gaps.
Archivists and curators are debating who—or what—should manage 21st-century archives. Should collection managers exploit the potential gains of extracting, describing, and discovering data with AI, or can only humans be trusted with the integrity of our cultural heritage?
The webinar on 2 April features a pair of researchers who’ve championed integrating both approaches. Sara and Ben Brumfield have been on the forefront of crowdsourcing archival workflows for two decades; their software FromThePage is used by government agencies such as the National Archives and British Library as well as universities like Harvard and Stanford.
As innovators in collection management, it’s perhaps not surprising they have also been early testers of applying generative AI to cultural collections.
Rather than abandon the “human in the loop,” however, the Brumfield’s approach investigates marrying AI and crowdsourcing to combine both efficiency and accuracy. In their upcoming teleconference, they’ll report on experiments using AI to transcribe handwriting, extract names of people and places, and generally improve access to both analog and digital collections.
We’ll discuss controversial uses of AI such as the Virginia Libraries’ portrait of a former slave reconstructed from verbal descriptions in the historical record. Participants will also come away with practical techniques for integrating chatbots or the lay public in improving collection quality and accessibility.
Registration is open for this free webinar. The Digital Curation program is an online graduate certificate intended for professionals looking to work in museums, archives, laboratories, studios, government offices, and anywhere that people need to manage digital files. The program walks students through all phases of managing digitized or born-digital artifacts, from acquisition to preservation. Summer 2025 offerings include two courses in metadata beginning in May and July, respectively.