Engaging in research and cultural heritage collaborations to endorse AI and machine learning activities
Creators: name: Näpärä, Liisa Maria
name: Pihlaja, Päivi Maria
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Session 2: Unlocking the AI potential

description: This paper discusses the role that the research and project services could play in outlining the position of a GLAM actor like national library towards artificial intelligence (AI) related initiatives and service development. The paper focuses on recent activities at the (NLF). We describe the variety of activities within the library, ranging from infrastructure services to research related needs, and also consider their embeddedness in wide-ranging partnership networks. A central question is how unshared understanding regarding AI within the NLF influence its role in this development. The National Library of Finland (NLF) has become increasingly engaged in various research projects in and between different disciplines. During the last couple of years, the library has taken coordinated measures to developing its practices related to these. Recently, researchers’ experiences from collaboration with the library were systematically collected. Needs of the researchers related to the digital collections of the library were mapped, and our practices were benchmarked against other national libraries. We will firstly present a number of data-driven collaboration projects that have taken place at the library during 2021 with a digital humanities approach. While others have been more focused on analogue collections, some of these have developed new tools for data processing or otherwise promoted the use of artificial intelligence. New knowledge and experiences gained from these collaborations permitted us to deepen our understanding of how to foster such activities internally. Now focusing on AI and machine learning, we performed a qualitative analysis relying on internal information collection at the NLF gained by means of several expert interviews. These exchanges provided us with an interesting overview of the large networks consisting of both national and international partners or other external stakeholders in which the NLF operates. Examples of these activities reach beyond the library sector and research activities. They concern, to mention a few examples, infrastructures facilitating open access to publications and cultural heritage materials, or dataset services and the long-term preservation and findability of these by sustaining and improving the quality of metadata and identifiers. New opportunities related to the use and promotion of the machine learning methods and interoperability of systems have also unfolded through partnership agreements and targeted collaborative research efforts. In this paper, we will describe our findings. We will present our analysis the variety of internal activities along with the large cooperation networks and joint interests that already exist between GLAM organisations and with researchers on national or international levels. We maintain that the future role of AI at the NLF could only be apprehended as part of larger partnerships and collaborations. This also applies to development projects within the library. We seek to delineate measures that may be helpful in modelling internally a shared outlook towards these broad and complex issues.