[Music]
welcome everyone um and welcome back
after afternoon tea think firstly thank
you to catherine for the amazing
conversation that we had about shovel
ready glamour graduates
uh next up we have ingrid and catherine
ingrid drives practice change in digital
transformation of humanity's research
and cultural heritage
through the development of new
technologies and national infrastructure
she's a leader and volunteer in the
international lodlam which is linked
open data for libraries archives and
museums and ai for lamb which is ai for
libraries archives and museums and in
those communities and she's also a
metadata nerd and a bit of a tech head
and she's also fabulous
uh catherine has is also joining us
who is an ai for lam co
committee volunteer she has worked with
archives in the show since 2003 and is
currently the associate director at the
royal melbourne institute of technology
or rmit library
she is a phd student in her final year
at monash university and catherine is
also the past editor of the australian
society of archivist journal archives
and manuscripts and is currently on the
editorial board member for the archives
and records journal so over to you
lovely ladies thanks
thanks sarah lovely to be here with you
today um
i'm coming to you today from none or
land
and i'd like to pay my respects to
elders past present and emerging and i'd
like to introduce my co-speaker
catherine jarvi
thank you great to be here everyone nice
to meet you and i would also like to pay
my respects to their elders past present
future and anybody here today
great so we're going to talk to you
today it's going to be a bit of a
conversation between catherine and i
about the grassroots action that's been
going on in the regional chapter for ai
forum by libraries archives and museums
we spoke at the uh go glam mini
conference last year
and we just thought we'd provide a bit
of an update
to let you know what we've been up to
where we think we're heading and why we
think you might like to be involved in
some way shape or form
so we'll just kick off
okay so there's a bunch of us that have
come together to do some coordination
and you can see that there's quite a
sprinkling there of people from
australia who've taken on coordination
activities not everybody's active at the
same time
people's lives of course
interrupt um and their ability to
participate is welcomed whenever it's
available and um
they can take a back seat whenever they
need to so we've had people move in and
out of the coordination group
and
people come to this
idea of ai for lamb and what we might do
as a community a little bit differently
which is great
so we're going to cover four questions
today why take a grassroots approach
why does community building across group
boundaries matter
who have we heard from and what have we
learned and what happens next
so we're going to enter into a bit of a
conversation and we really look forward
to your questions or comments as we go
through
so catherine i'm going to hand this one
to you
why do you think a grassroots approach
was appealing
yeah so for me i thought i'd talk to my
motivation for joining and that was
because being a grassroots group you get
a whole different cohort of people from
various different
backgrounds different levels of
organization different types of people
so
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my particular interest in
ai
and applying that into my workplace
setting was to see what other people
were doing how they were applying ai
within their personal projects or their
technical projects at work and because i
work in a library we haven't got any ai
projects underway
when i began
aiflam a year ago
so i was hoping to learn from my peers
and really bring that back to the
librarians within the university to say
hey there's this great project that
others are doing we could do something
similar or these are the skills that we
could acquire particularly because my
role is
associate director of engagement
we want to engage our staff to
really upskill in ai where it's
necessary for their role or where their
role can be built and expanded upon its
cur its current form and also recruit in
to the library the skills required but
we need the projects
for to attract those those people and um
create those position descriptions and
create opportunities for people to come
into the library so that was my
motivation and the reason why i thought
joining a grassroots group like ai for
lamb would be useful to me it hasn't
necessarily panned out yet i'm still on
the hunt for you know
as we grow and expand i'm still looking
for that perfect position description to
create within the library or perfect
project to start and kick off but i'm
sure it will happen
yeah that's really good it's nice and
concrete
i really like when we talked about this
that this was a really clear motivation
and it was quite different to mine
because
i'm not in a management role i'm
managing an infrastructure project at
anu but i became
really interested in ai because i went
overseas to have a talk to
some colleagues in norway
who were doing um who'd kicked off this
whole community and it just kind of blew
my mind
and i
really could see the need to have a
cross-cutting agenda because there were
so many different viewpoints to sort of
try and draw together and to learn from
to complement whatever i might be able
to bring
and
i really liked the grassroots approach
because i could see that it would
create a nice complement to the
professional associations that many in
our community belong to
and it's quite hard to kind of pull all
those different parts of the glam
equation together let alone bring them
together with the research
community and bring them together with
the technical community so that was what
really appealed to me
about the whole idea of a grass roots
approach and also i guess
in relation to those different
viewpoints
to be able to translate ai technology
well was really important to me
personally probably because i've had a
lot of involvement over the last
i don't know how many years
with technology development and it's
really important um not to take uh
technologies at face value and that
critical kind of thinking
seemed to be a really nice niche to
enter into with others because you get
so much use from other perspectives
so yeah that's kind of why the
grassroots approach and catherine and i
thought that this this is a good way of
conveying to you the reasons that people
have stepped up to just be part of the
slack channel that we've got and also to
help with coordination
so catherine i'll hand it back to you
around community building
yeah so as i said we're looking to build
our ai philam community and
i find that the events that we do have
and the conversations that we have
within ai for lamb is a good
conversation starter within my library
so i can share the links to our youtube
videos with them
uh
we're really big users of yammer within
rmit libraries so
i can share the links there and have
local conversations about it
it has been hard to get people to talk
about ai i think they might be wary
about it so i'd be interested to have a
chat um
later in our conversations in the
questions
but um
i think making people feel
less scared about ai i think there's
this impression that maybe you know
robots will take over
librarians jobs or archivists roles uh
it's about you know talking about the
opportunities i feel to expand uh what
we're doing and create new roles that
incorporates both the human and the
technology together
uh so i feel that has really
being part of ai for land has helped me
have that conversation and bring that
conversation into my workplace
also i'm studying a grassroots animal
rights organization so i
really interested in communities as part
of my phd research and that research is
about
appraisal within communities and
appraisal being how
archives are stored created and why and
for how long
not only by people but by technologies
and that i think has really led to an
interest in alignment with that study
with linked open data the open web and
really thinking about how communities
can empower themselves to be their own
archivists and again not necessarily
while you're challenging the traditional
archival models you're not necessarily
putting the archivist out of a job it's
partnering with archivists so
that's really aligned there i feel that
in my workplace it's about making feel
people feel comfortable about the ai
conversation and in my studies thinking
about how we can empower communities in
their own archival practice without
putting the archivists out in the coals
that it's a partnership
yeah that's um i think the the comfort
we had a bit of a chat um in prepping
for this talk about how important
feeling comfortable with technologies is
and i guess because my background is
lobby background
literacy and dexterity have always been
elements of library practice where
you're teaching people about new ways to
find information or new types of
information or new ways to create
information
that's definitely been an element of
practice and
yeah i guess
the community building for me was really
important because i think
we get the best out of each other
because of our slightly different
approaches to things
and because i've worked in e-research
you know
probably for about 12 years now
and it's really altered the way that i
think about um services around
collections glam collections
and of course around research because
i've worked with such a different range
of people and i've really benefited
they've been the occasional argument
around you know uh what ai can and
should do and and uh you know it's
sometimes been intimidating for me
especially when i've had a really you
know toe-to-toe conversation with one of
my physics
um colleagues uh
from my time at arnett um because he
comes at things from a very kind of
particular way and i um i really have
seen the benefit of that and that's why
i think
working across the boundaries is so
important and because it's really clear
in research
and it's just come out in the australian
national collaborative research
infrastructure strategy roadmap that
there is a a role being seen for those
who are perhaps not technical to come in
and bring their different types of
expertise
to ai technology development and
application and it's there out there in
the draft that's just been put out there
in december last year that they see a
specific role for social science and i
would argue for humanities researchers
as well
to bring that expertise to this equation
so i guess that's really underlined for
me
the importance
but also because
that knowledge transfer
does need someone that's trusted
to help
facilitate a conversation or to kind of
test ideas against
and i gave a talk to some nazla
colleagues last year because i could see
a massive opportunity to bring the
social skill sets to this
use of ai technology and its
developments
yeah
okay
so this is the matrix um
uh that we put together for the
community and i guess it just gives you
a bit of a breakdown
of the areas that we're trying to work
in
we're
trying to understand how we can work
with our colleagues across the tasman
and we've had some success with that
through the speaking program which is
terrific
um
we've caught up with each other on a
regular basis it's pretty relaxed i
think it is but
most people sort of come and go as they
can
we're really looking for more community
leaders to come forward and people to
pick up an initiative that they're
interested in to drive that forward
um
and we've had some really interesting uh
i guess
moments where we've discovered that
because we're on the other side of the
world where a lot of the
action
is not happening like a lot of the ai
for lamb action is happening in the
northern hemisphere that we've got real
um practical challenges around how we
work with our colleagues and the rest of
the world who are doing some terrific
project work
so um i guess these are like this is
just a bit of a snapshot of what we're
trying to do
so catherine listening and learning what
have you listened to and learned about
yeah so there's been so many really
interesting presentations and the
recordings are available on youtube i
just picked one out
as an example about
one that really stood out and
there may be so many more that we could
delve into this year as well but the
csiro hearing about their collections
they've got a living archival living
collection with biological specimens and
organisms that are alive and having to
be catalogued to a sound library um that
has the sounds of birds so the diversity
of the collection is really immense and
that struck a chord with me
thinking about the different databases
and data sets that need to be brought
together to
um
really make those accessible uh i can
relate to that having a system that we
have archival records in our trim and
content manager system and then we've
got the library alma primo system
separate separated out so it's a sort of
perennial problem of how to bring those
together and make them
more easily accessible to our users and
i know um the
state library of queensland have done
some really interesting things to bring
their archives and library systems
together so that one in particular
struck a chord with me
okay so um
i'm going to skip across my areas of
interest because we're running short of
time but um
the
there is a very clear sentiment amongst
the group of coordinators to really
support teaching and learning and there
was some working group activity
last year to try and understand how to
bring people into that process of
learning about ai and
perhaps playing with ai technologies
and that was um just a bunch of people
who decided to come together and work on
that but we managed to forge a bit of a
link
with the wider community
who are doing uh teaching and learning
work and i've got a link there to one of
their outputs because they really went
for it and it's a it looks like a
terrific handbook
for people to go through but i think
this really was um kind of an underlying
motivation was for many people to expand
their understanding and to try and lift
up others as they're trying to kind of
find their way into this technology
so
uh last but not least
what are we up to next um so catherine
i'll throw the ball to you just quickly
well mine's an easy one because all the
details are there on screen and people
can message ingrid that's ingrid's email
address we've got a website that ai for
lamb.org is the broader uh global
website so we are connected into the
global
ai for lamb group but we have
a slack channel as well as a google
drive that is open as well so you all
are welcome and encouraged to reach out
to us and join us in our quest to talk
about all things ai yeah nice one um so
we're looking to have some more events
and talks and alexis tyndall has told me
today that she's definitely up for
driving ahead with that and i think
we're going to have a planning meeting
in february
between
australia and new zealand because we've
got some great colleagues from the
national library of new zealand working
with us
we're looking for more cross-sector
collaborations we had a nice
collaboration with nasa and also with
vala last year just to make sure that we
leverage what we're doing
we've been putting forward this idea of
a big data global challenge and anyone's
welcome to talk to me about that um and
we're looking to try and see
how we can work with our peers on the
other side of the world i've just had an
email from tom cromer at stanford and
svenar
from the norwegian national library to
see how we can work with each other
because they had a terrific fantastic
futures conference
on the other side of the world last year
in paris and of course none of us could
go so
they're really open and wonderful
colleagues are to be working with
and just to give you a bit of a flavor
of
what the other
people on the other side of the world
were thinking about when they talked
about a global data set amy abby potter
sorry from the library of congress
took this idea
that i put it forward to that conference
to think about what a global data set
might be
and
why we might want to do something like
that and um
these are the kind of themes that came
out through the consultation
but i'll
put a pin in it there and thank you all
for your attention and thank you uh
catherine for jumping in with me at the
last minute and um yeah uh
let's hear what your questions are
thanks thanks everyone
thanks
thank you both that was fantastic and i
love that cats were in the in the word
cloud there so
it was the first thing i noticed was
cats was there um so we've got a couple
of questions for you uh what are the key
challenges in getting grassroots
organizations up and running in this
space
i think well from my perspective it was
about taking a risk um
i sat
in 2020 after being to that conference
um and i went
self-funded went overseas to the
conference
at stanford had an amazing time and
there was one person from australia
there
sarah graham from university of sydney i
was so thrilled and then i thought i
can't bear the idea of not having an
opportunity to get with other people so
i just took a punt
and
i think for me that's the biggest
challenge is actually
creating a space for people
to do what they think
is a good thing to do and to help each
other
and
not to put too much structure around it
and
to support people to come and go
and in particular through this
because people's lives have been going
up and down and people have been amazing
but you know i'm i'm comfortable with i
think a reasonably high level of
uncertainty so that that's my answer
what about you catherine yeah i was
going to say the same uh
and that particularly this group has
been
quite compared to say other groups you
feel the weight of obligation to be
attending and to you know do so many
things for say professional societies or
other other groups that you attend
whereas ingrid is the leader um and just
us as a cultural you know the culture
that we have very supportive of each
other for that the people going in and
out so that is the difference that i
feel has really made a difference to and
encouraged people to come along and have
a go
yeah definitely because sometimes people
have the best ideas all they need is
someone to be a little engine behind
them
and we can all do that for everybody for
each other
okay uh next question is from donna
benjamin who's in the chat um we have an
innovation program at red hat around ai
and ml uh around the use cases i'd be
interested in exploring uh if there's
any opportunities for us to collaborate
with aiphalm uh on some kind of
experiment uh how could we start this
conversation
oh just um
there's my email address
just uh contact uh anytime
that's kind of why we've jumped into
these forums because we're looking
either to be
partners or to help with
broken partnerships
yep
and the next one is
for extending into education have you
thought about reaching out to it
teachers associations
uh
i don't i'm not personally catherine you
we've mainly um reached out to the glam
sector so that could be something we can
put on our to-do list for this year
yeah or whoever asked that question um
you could come along and drive it
um how can we get involved and are there
any prerequisites
no no prerequisites just put your hand
up
and uh it's really great if you can jump
in the slack space uh and if you'd like
to coordinate just get in touch
i'll be delighted to announce that sarah
jermaine has put her hand up um and i've
already got a little list of things that
she might like to do
and one last question um have you seen
ai or ml being used in any hackathons
using information archives at all and do
you see that as a positive or a negative
uh
well not me personally i haven't seen
hacking i've been to a workshop i guess
i went to a workshop hosted by
colleagues at the norwegian national
library just to
give tensorflow a bit of a run over with
a bunch of images and that was really
interesting because
they've got computer scientists in their
library team
and
they're really
working hard to unlock their collections
and in particular around norwegian
language because
many of the um
i guess data sets and technologies are
built heavily around english and they
need norwegian they don't need english
so
i think there are really productive
reasons to get in and have a hack and to
get people around a problem what about
you catherine i've been to one in a
european one through the there's an open
glam forum that i found it out through
there and again the time
it's very northern centric so the time
wasn't very australian friendly so we
find that that's you know a bit of a
hump to get everybody together from
across the globe at the right time frank
um so i was just willing to stay up and
see what that was all about and in terms
of any downsides well there was a call
out for
archival collections to be involved so
uh people were willingly had collections
that they wanted to be hacked
and the risk assessment i guess was left
with those
archival institutions to put their hand
up with i think they were typically
already open and published archival
content so
relatively risk-free in terms of hacking
yeah but i guess that the question means
that there is a gap here for us
given your answer catherine there's a
gap here for us to look at
whether someone wants to come forward
and and
work with others to get a hack up with
cultural collections we had a great talk
earlier today
because acme have made their api openly
available
and
have put some jupiter notebooks out
there on co-lab so i do think it's ripe
for the picking
oh i'll help out a little bit but there
might be other people who might want to
jump up
and pitch in
that's wonderful thank you so much both
for
for speaking to us today um at 4 20
next up we've got moving to self-managed
open access publishing uh from jesse lim
and that will be a fantastic talk i'm
sure so thank you both again and um
hopefully everyone joins ai for lamb now
that i have oh please do join us yeah
thanks thank you