Upcoming Seminar: The Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents’ Experience with AI Tools – A New Approach to Enhancing Access to Historical Records
On May 21 at 15:00 (EEST), the third online seminar in the series co-organized by digitalhumanities.lv, CLARIN-LV, and DARIAH-EU, focusing on digital humanities and historical research, will take place.
The seminar, titled
“The Experience of the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents in Using AI Tools: A New Approach to Promoting Access to Historical Records”,
will feature speaker Natālija Lāce, an expert from the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents.
The archival field is undergoing significant transformation — photographs, videos, and sound recordings are no longer just static witnesses to history but dynamic sources of information requiring innovative management solutions. The Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents is actively testing and implementing artificial intelligence tools in its day-to-day operations to improve description, searchability, and accessibility, making its collections more available and usable for researchers and the public.
To improve search functionality and processing of user requests, the archive has developed a Multimodal Similarity Search tool, which can identify not only people but also objects and symbols in images. The seminar will explore the role of AI technologies in archival work, comparing various methods of information retrieval and evaluating their accuracy. Three approaches will be examined:
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Human-created and verified metadata from the archive's database,
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Traditional keyword-based search, and
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AI-powered methods, including Multimodal Similarity Search.
This comparative analysis will offer insights into the effectiveness, advantages, and limitations of each method and show how AI technologies can enhance access to and use of historical documents in archival contexts.
Natālija Lāce is a metadata specialist in the Document Access Division of the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents. She holds a Master’s degree in History from the University of Latvia and actively expands her expertise in digital and AI-driven archival solutions. Since 2024, she has been a member of the Expert Group on Photographic and Audiovisual Archives of the International Council on Archives (ICA). Her current work focuses on sustainable archiving practices and the use of AI in small-scale archive systems.
All interested participants are welcome!
🔗 To receive the Zoom link, please register here:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Dnr7CWnpQ46VMa2Is6e5oQ
This seminar is organized within the framework of the project
“Latvia’s 20th–21st Century History: Social Morphogenesis, Heritage and Challenges” (No. VPP-IZM-Vēsture-2023/1-0003),
in collaboration with the project
“Development of an Open and FAIR-Compliant Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002).