AI 101 for Archives and Museums Symposium 2025, Day 2

About This Event

Agenda:

10:00-10:15 am

Meet and Greet with Coffee and Tea

10:15-11:15 am

Keynote by Dr. Karim Boughida, SUNY Stony Brook
"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.

11:15-11:30 am

Break

11:30 am -12:30 pm

“Workshop and Hands On Learning with Jeff Suszczynski, University of Rochester”

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 the University of Rochester 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, in which 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 from the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries’ collections will be provided for those who are unable to supply their own).

12:30 pm – 1:00 pm

Wrap Up and Next Steps

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Finish Hands On learning, optional

Attendees are welcome to stay to get more hands-on assistance with the workshop materials.

Co-sponsors

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