Miguel Umlauff, eArchiving Initiative
On November 7, 2024, the Eötvös 10 Cultural Centre in Budapest hosted the conference ‘Theory Meets Practice: Harnessing AI for practical implementations in digital archiving’. Organised jointly by the eArchiving Initiative and the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL), the event discussed the implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in historical archives and showcased practical uses of AI in archives in Hungary and across Europe.
The event was opened by Dr. Cseh Gergő Bendegúz, general director of ÁBTL, who emphasised the importance of new technological developments for historical archives as they will have the task of preserving current events for the future.
The first session of the conference began with Sven Schlarb, scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and eArchiving Initiative technical lead, who talked about the ethical challenges that the use of AI in archival sources might pose.
This was followed by the presentations of projects developed by Hungarian research institutes, that are, or can be, applied to archives. Péter Kőrösi-Szabó, Domokos Czifra and Gábor Kovács of the Rényi Mathematics Institute explored the use of AI-powered OCR for degraded documents and archives and on retrieval-augmented generation and its applications in archives. Tamás Váradi of HUN-REN, the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, reviewed the development of Hungarian language models in the context of global trends.
The second session focused on AI use in different archives. Anssi Jääskeläinen of the South Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (XAMK) presented the use of practical Open Source AI ‘stubs’ for archives. Zsolt Bánki and Noémi Vadász considered how artificial Intelligence has been used in the National Archives of Hungary. Zoltán Lux, Anna Kulcsár and Dániel Havasi-Mészáros of ÁBTL, examined the application of AI in historical archives. The session finished with Balint Csollei and Chris Reynolds of The National Archives, UK, who explored the application of AI for record appraisal.
The event concluded with a round table where panellists and attendees discussed how the use of AI affects archives. A key conclusion was the need for archivists to work side by side with records managers, producers and IT experts, to train those technologies to provide the public with rapid access to documentation and information.
The presentations are now available and recordings of the event will be released in the coming days.