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THE FUTURE OF LIBRARIES AND AI: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE TBD
Event: PTPL 100th Annual Meeting Documents: PTPL 100th Annual Meeting Agenda | Treasurer's Report | 2024-2025 PTPL Ballots | 2023 PTPL 99th Annual Meeting Minutes AGENDA: 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Arrival, Registration, and Badge Pickup Attendees register, receive their name badges, and enjoy some light refreshments. Keynote: “Artificial Intelligence: Dream | Dread | Deconstruct” / LanR. David Lankes
R. David Lankes is the Virginia & Charles Bowden Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information. He is the recipient of ALA’s Reference and User Services Association 2021 Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award for distinguished contribution to reference librarianship. His book, The Atlas of New Librarianship won the 2012 ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Award for the Best Book in Library Literature. Lankes is a passionate advocate for librarians and their essential role in today’s society. 10:45 AM – 11:00 AM: Break “Exploring Computational Description: Machine Learning Experiments at the Library of Congress” / Caroline Saccucci and Abigail Potter Workflows for cataloging digital material are evolving and have the potential to be augmented by automated technologies. Over the last two years, the Library of Congress has undertaken phased research and experimentation to explore the potential of machine-generated cataloging methods. Exploring Computational Description (ECD) is an ongoing experiment co-led by Abigail Potter in LC Labs and Caroline Saccucci in Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access. In ECD1, the Library experimented with five different machine learning models for training, testing and documenting. The most promising approaches were applied to uncataloged ebooks and evaluated. Additional potential automated workflow improvements were prototyped and tested in ECD2. The process of evaluation will result in foundational quality benchmarks for automated methods along with detailed benefits, risks, and costs. ECD outcomes will be used to inform the future development of born-digital cataloging workflows at the Library of Congress. ECD utilizes a set of tools developed by the LC Labs team to plan, document, analyze, prioritize, and assess AI technologies. The presentation will include a review of the AI planning tools and the results from the first two years plus a look ahead to ECD3. Caroline Saccucci is chief of the U.S. Programs, Law, and Literature Division at the Library of Congress in the United States of America. She is currently the chair of the IFLA Subject Analysis and Access Committee and the U.S. representative to the ISSN General Assembly and Governing Board. She has written or co-written articles published by Cataloging and Classification Quarterly (CCQ), Library Resources & Technical Services, and JLIS.it, and she co-edited a special issue of CCQ on artificial intelligence in library applications. Abigail Potter is Senior Innovation Specialist within the Office of the Chief Information Officer’s LC Labs. She has been at the Library of Congress since 2006 and has developed programs to advance digital preservation, web archiving, computational access, and the responsible use of AI. She is currently co-chair of the AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums community and serves on various AI working groups in the Federal sector. 11:45 AM – 12:15 AM: PTPL Business Meeting and Awarding of Scholarships Treasurer's Report | 2024-2025 PTPL Ballots | 2023 PTPL 99th Annual Meeting Minutes Scholarship winners Rebecca Gray Kurylo and Kayla O’Leary PTPL will convene it’s 100th business meeting and pass out ballots for the election of the new executive board. This year’s recipients of the PTPL Scholarship for future librarians interested in technical services will be honored and receive their award certificates. Rebecca “Becky” Gray Kurylo is a current student at Catholic University’s Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science program. She is currently employed by the National Gallery of Art’s Library as a Student Assistant Library Technician in Technical Services. Becky previously worked for Fairfax, Prince William, and Arlington County Public Libraries. Becky also volunteered at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library. She also worked for Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library when she was an undergraduate student there. Becky hopes to be a cataloger for an art library one day. She enjoys spending her free time with her one year old daughter (Callie), husband (Stephen), and two dogs, (Cosmo and Daisy) at home in Falls Church, Virginia. Kayla O'Leary is a 2024 graduate of the Master of Science, Information Science program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She graduated from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University (St. Joseph, MN) in 2022 with a BA in History and English (Creative Writing concentration), where she discovered her passion for library work and research. During her Masters program, she gained an interest in reparative metadata, facilitating discoverability, and universal cataloging/metadata standards through internships with the University of Richmond and the Library of Congress. She also worked as a research assistant with UTK, analyzing data science courses in LIS programs in North America. Currently, Kayla works at Randolph-Macon College's McGraw-Page Library in Ashland, Virginia as the Circulation and Resource Sharing Manager. In her free time, she loves watching movies/TV, reading fantasy books, and doing puzzles. 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM: Lunch Break Attendees will pick up the Panera lunch they chose at registration from the designated tables and have an opportunity to sit and chat with their colleagues. “Adapt or Die? Adapt and Rise” / Kelly McKernan When you create an image using a generative AI tool, those images aren’t magically appearing out of nothing. AI tools such as Midjourney are trained on the work of full-time artists without consent or compensation. In this talk, Kelly McKernan will discuss their personal experience with having a third of their portfolio scraped as training data and how that has impacted their career. McKernan is a plaintiff in the class action lawsuit Andersen et al v. Stability AI Ltd. et al, and will discuss the lawsuit’s current status and how artists are fighting for regulation and protections in this new era. Kelly McKernan (they/them) is an independent artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. They graduated with a B.F.A. in 2009 from Kennesaw State University in Georgia and has been a professional time artist since. Original watercolor and acryla gouache paintings are created for galleries, private commissions, and their online store where fine art prints and other products are also sold. In addition to maintaining a large social media following, Kelly shares tutorials and teaches workshops, travels across the US for events and comic cons, and also creates illustrations for books, comics, games, and more. As of 2023, Kelly is an adjunct professor of illustration at Nossi College of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. They are also a lead plaintiff in the landmark copyright class action lawsuit Andersen vs Stability and is a vocal advocate for protecting human artists in the age of generative AI. 1:45 PM – 2:00 PM: Break “Engaging with AI at the Smithsonian: Experiences and Insights” / Richard Naples This presentation explores the grassroots efforts undertaken to spark and maintain an active interest in artificial intelligence within the Smithsonian Institution. It will highlight effective strategies for engaging specialists over time, contributing to a broader institutional consideration of AI’s role. Attendees will gain insights into practical approaches for fostering specialist communities through reading groups, dedicated AI interest groups, and specialized educational initiatives like GenAI classes. Additionally, the presentation will address the ethical challenges associated with AI, emphasizing a balanced and critical perspective on its integration and implications. Richard Naples is a Technical Information Specialist in the Metadata and Analytics Department of the Digital Projects and Initiatives Division of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. In his current role, he oversees the development and deployment of Tableau dashboards for assessing library programs and processes, while also supporting research assessment for Smithsonian administrators, unit directors, and others as part of the team responsible for Smithsonian Research Online, the system that tracks the research output of the Institution. A strong proponent of open principles, he has recently become more involved with Wikidata and linked open data and their importance for the open citations movement. 2:45 PM – 3:30 PM: Panel discussion 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM: PTPL historical moment and passing of the gavel. 4:00 PM: Meeting adjournment |
