First presentation:  Leveraging AI for Improved Transcription in Special Collections and Academic Libraries
The Georgia State University Library houses an extensive collection of audio-visual assets that serve as invaluable resources for research and education, including oral histories, tv and radio broadcasts, labor union meetings, and more. Historically, the process of transcribing these sensitive materials has been labor-intensive and time-consuming. This presentation explores an in-progress project to create a custom user interface for OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition system to improve the processing of these materials. We will discuss the motivations and needs assessment for the project, project planning, development and challenges, and system testing and refinement, in addition to reporting on any findings regarding the project’s impact on efficiency, accessibility, and cost savings.

Project link: https://github.com/gsu-library/whisper-scribe

PRESENTERS:

• Rachel Senese Myers is the Digital Projects Coordinator at Georgia State University Library, where she leads the digitization and oral history processing teams, oversees Digital Collections, and manages the digital preservation platform.
• Jon Bodnar is the Library Technology Project Manager and Web Services Unit Lead at Georgia State University Library, where he oversees web operations, supervises technical staff, and coordinates cross-departmental projects to enhance digital library services.

Second presentation:  Leveling the Descriptive Field: The Role of Consumer-Grade AI in Archival Practice

The University at Buffalo, University Archives is leveraging consumer-grade AI to enhance the creation of descriptive metadata for over 2,000 hours of audio in the UB-WBFO Radio Archive. Utilizing Microsoft Copilot, this initiative aims to produce concise and detailed program descriptions from audio transcriptions, facilitating inclusion in the University Libraries, Digital Collections and the National Archive of Public Broadcasting. By developing targeted command prompts paired with transcription files, archivists have drastically reduced processing time, generating generic summaries efficiently. This innovative approach not only improves access to archival content and exemplifies the impact of AI on archival practices but also evidences how entry-level or consumer-grade AI tools can be integrated successfully into project workflows.

PRESENTERS:

• Hope Dunbar is the University Archivist at the University at Buffalo, where she leads archival operations, outreach, and collection development with a focus on community engagement and regional history.
• Ken Axford is the WBFO Project Archivist at the University at Buffalo, specializing in the preservation and access of audio archives through innovative and collaborative approaches.

Third presentation:  Developing SpeakEZ to Expedite Collection Processing

Over the past five years, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in the University of Kentucky Libraries has accessioned an annual average of over 1,000 new oral history interviews into the archival collection, exceeding the staff’s capacity to process. This presentation reflects on designing the SpeakEZ system using AI and natural language processing to transcribe and process the Center’s rapidly growing oral history collection, totaling over 20,000 interviews. SpeakEZ consists of automated transcription, the generation of new dimensions of descriptive metadata, the OHMS-ifier, which prepares draft versions of time logs/indexes for use in the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), and finally, the Riskalizer, which assesses and evaluates content for various points of potential sensitivity. The session will include discussion of the system’s successes and role in addressing accessibility requirements, some of the design and workflow challenges introduced by the system, and possible applications of SpeakEZ for libraries beyond archived oral history collections.

PRESENTER: Doug Boyd, Ph.D., Director, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries