Archives/AI: possibilities and pitfalls
October 23, 2024 / 9:30 to 3:00 • Whipple Memorial Town Hall, 25 Seamans Road, New London, NH
October 23, 2024 / 9:30 to 3:00 • Whipple Memorial Town Hall, 25 Seamans Road, New London, NH
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Join the New Hampshire Archives Group on October 23 at Whipple Hall in New London for its Fall 2024 workshop and Annual Meeting — or attend online. Portions of this workshop will offer hands-on activities for those attending in person.
IntroductionArtificial Intelligence (AI) is inevitably coming to archives, libraries, and museums. On the one hand, the technology may provide useful tools to help us manage and research our collections. On the other hand, it raises the specter of AI-generated content degrading those same collections. It's time to learn more about the potential use and misuse of this technology in the library/archives/museum setting. We will hear from practitioners about the rapidly changing state of AI tools and their application to specific archival tasks. And you will have an opportunity to do a little AI testing of your own!
Program
We are pleased to offer the following presentations (click on title for synopsis & presenter):
9:30 AM — NHAG Annual Meeting
A brief annual meeting to hear reports from the President and Treasurer and vote on nominations to the executive board. Brantley Palmer is president of the NH Archives Group. 9:45 AM — workshop WELCOME
Welcome to New London and setting the stage for workshop presentations and discussion. Jim Perkins is New London's Town Archivist and a past president of NHAG. 10:00 AM — intro to Crowdsourcing
An introduction to crowdsourced transcription projects using the FromThePage platform. Sara Brumfield double majored in Computer Science and Women’s Studies from Rice University and worked at IBM for 20 years before co-founding FromThePage with her husband, Ben. FromThePage is simple technology that lets people collaborate to produce usable data from historical texts. Volunteers contribute their passion and expertise; archives and libraries highlight their collections. "The results are magical: discoveries about material; public awareness of historic reality, and better public access to records." 10:30 AM — 10 ways AI will Change archives
AI is set to transform special collections and archives significantly. This presentation provides a survey and assessment of ten ways AI tools are being tested and piloted in archives around the country. Sara Brumfield, see previous bio. 11:30 AM — AI Exploration at Rauner Library
Kent Randell will be speaking about "Exploring the Uses Artificial Intelligence at Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth." The talk will cover three topics: ethics, using a Large Language Model (LLM) to write abstracts to oral histories, and third, using an LLM for translation. Kent Randell is Assistant Archivist for Digital Collections at Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth. He leads a small team in collecting and preserving the zeros and ones for posterity, including both born-digital items and scans of physical materials. Prior to coming to Dartmouth Kent held a faculty position as College Archivist for St. Mary's College of Maryland for 10 years and was awarded the Aldom-Plansoen Distinguished Chair for 2020-2022. 12:30 PM — Lunch break
1:00 PM — What's legal? AI, copyright & fair use
Kyle Courtney, Harvard Libraries. Lawyer, librarian, copyright academic, armchair philosopher, gentleman farmer, no-sleeper, soi disant scholar, novice gambler, PhD mixologist, and bowtie enthusiast. 1:45 PM — More AI projects in NH
Preliminary results from AI experimentation with town warrant articles and NH Troubadour magazine. Bobbi Slossar, New Hampshire State Library, technology consultant 2:15 PM — Hands-on with AI
For our hands-on workshop activity, bring your computer, we'll help you create an OpenAI account if necessary, and then together we'll play with translating documents using ChatGPT. Kent Randell, Rauner Special Collections at Dartmouth Post-workshop tour: We are pleased to offer attendees a tour of the New London Town Archives and/or Colby-Sawyer College Archives. Please state your preference(s) when you register online. Tours require a 10 minute walk between sites. Each group is limited to a dozen people so sign up early! |
Handouts, Resources, etc.
We've added a resource page for "Archives/AI" to provide handouts and other resources for workshop participants. And here's a bonus: You can browse resource pages from past workshops... Just choose your topic!
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