Archivists

The role of archivists is thus transformed, as they need to learn to make use of machine reasoning for appraisal and selection and to assess the assessments of machines. The archive becomes a big data organisation and like all big data organisations needs to at least partly put its trust into Artificial Intelligence (AI), mostly in the form of machine learning, to deal with the transformation.

Wellesley College becomes the fifth Oberlin Group and second Boston Library Consortium institution to join JSTOR’s Tier 3 charter program, advancing responsible, AI-assisted collections stewardship with JSTOR Seeklight.

The Editorial Board recognizes ... potential to contribute to archivists’ professional work, including creating summary documents for finding aids and facilitating data analysis for large projects....

Hardman sees the potential for AI to be used as a tool to allow archivists to focus on the more complex, important work they’re trained to do—building context, shaping narratives, interpreting the record, and otherwise activating collections.

For example, AI systems can “automatically classify thousands of documents within minutes while maintaining high accuracy rates,” a task that would have once consumed countless staff hours 2 .

While working to eliminate a backlog ... In both projects, AI directly supported the work of archivists and made smaller pieces from large quantities of information accessible to the public more quickly....

As ChatGPT and other AI programs are being quickly integrated into creative materials, in addition to the potential of AI to impact archivists’ professional work through tasks such as creating summary documents for finding aids and/or facilitating analysis of large datasets, the Publications Board recognizes the importance of engaging with AI and adjacent topics via scholarship for practitioner training and emerging areas of inquiry or analysis, such as cybersecurity and ethics.1

Handwritten recognition --> manually transcribing manuscripts is very time consuming task which can be automated with AI (again, Transkribus is probably the best example here). Document/records processing --> there is a ton of archival material. Historical material is fine but current number of records is increasing massively. Who will process these? There wont be enough archivists to do that.