Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. Co-editors include Lise Jaillant, professor of digital cultural heritage at Loughborough University; Claire Warwick, professor of digital humanities at Durham University; Paul Gooding, professor of library studies and digital scholarship at the University of Glasgow; and Katherine Aske, lecturer in English at Napier University.
The collection brings together experts from libraries, archives, museums, digital humanities, and computer science to explore how cutting-edge AI and machine learning are reshaping cultural heritage. Authors explore technologies being applied to digitized and born-digital records within libraries, archives, and other heritage organizations, including innovative approaches in computer vision, Chat GPT, and user experience.
"While technology—and especially AI in recent years—seems always to move at the speed of light (becoming obsolete before we even begin to understand it), cultural heritage is something that inherently moves slowly and demands a very long attention span," said Layne-Worthey. "In similar fashion, the tech industry and profit motive may seem to dominate AI, while cultural heritage organizations are largely the domain of nonprofits motivated by other human and humanistic values. In this book, we've done our best to embrace, represent, and reconcile these competing timelines, motivations, and value systems."
The book is a direct outcome of AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organizations), a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Led by Layne-Worthey in the US, AEOLIAN was designed to investigate the role that AI can play to make born-digital and digitized cultural records more accessible to users.
iSchool faculty, staff, and alumni—Janet Swatscheno (MSLIS '14), Nikolaus Parulian (PhD '23), Peter Organisciak (PhD '15), Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman, Professor Ted Underwood, Digital Humanities Specialist Ryan Dubnicek, Layne-Worthey, and Downie—contributed to chapter six, "Making More Sense with Machines: Artificial Intelligence at the HathiTrust Research Center."
An open access version of Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations is available on the publisher's website.