AI 101 for Archives and Museums Symposium 2025 (RIT, Day 2)

Welcome to our fourth and final event of 2024-25 with AI 101 for Archives and Museums! Join us at the Rochester Institute of Technology for a workshop where you'll learn all about how artificial intelligence can revolutionize the way archives and museums operate. Register now to secure your spot!

This is an in-person event only. Please join us: there is ample parking at the event site.

For more information, see https://www.cnycorridor.net/calendar/ai-101-for-archives-and-museums-symposium-2025-day-2/.
Funding from the Central New York Humanities Corridor, with co-sponsors

• RIT Museum Studies Program
• RIT Archives
• Cornell University Library

Info: "Voices Unheard: A People's History of Artificial Intelligence (AI)". Drawing inspiration from Howard Zinn's explorative style, this talk delves into the untold stories of Artificial Intelligence, revisiting its origins and the less celebrated narratives that have shaped its development. We will explore the socio-political forces, particularly the "TESCREAL bundle," which links eugenics with the utopian promises of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the notable rise of big tech's AI dominance starting in 2025. In the second part, we will examine how AI has been implemented in libraries and the approaches adopted by library leaders. This session aims to deepen our understanding of AI's ethical implications and its impact across various sectors, highlighting these critical perspectives.

Info: Join us for a hands-on workshop in which we will demonstrate the power of AI tools to process a variety of archives-related documents (handwritten/typewritten inventories, cover sheets, etc.).
Jeff Suszczynski, Digital Scholarship Developer at UR River Campus Libraries, will start with a brief overview of some recent work done at the UR, showing how he used Amazon’s Textract service to parse and render thousands of typewritten cover sheets for one of their large collections. He will demonstrate how Textract’s ability to understand context and structure made it feasible to convert those typewritten cover sheets into EAD, targeted for ArchivesSpace ingestion.

We will then pivot to an extended hands-on session, participants will run their own documents through Textract and other similar AI tools to see how they work with familiar documents and collections (sample documents will be provided). If you wish to work with your own collections, reach out for guidance on parameters.

Host or Publisher AI, Archives, and Museums Working Group