As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems pull data from across the internet, library databases and our online presence, it generates a significant change in our relationship with knowledge. But what do we really know about this pervasive technology? Do our societies have robust guardrails in place to protect people and democracies, and have we reckoned with AI’s environmental impact?

Join award-winning Professor Kate Crawford, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the social and political implications of AI, as she explores how AI is reshaping our societies, ecosystems and power structures with host Natasha Mitchell in State Library Victoria's 2024 For Future Reference lecture.

Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Her book Atlas of AI won multiple awards and was named one of the best books of 2021 by New Scientist and The Financial Times. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and is on show at MoMA from 2022-2024.

Their latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI.

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On 18 March 2026, Kathy Reid delivered a lecture at State Library Victoria exploring Mozilla Common Voice, language bias in speech tech and Mozilla Data Collective’s approach to ethical data stewardship for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.

Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and technical communities. She has held several technical leadership positions, including roles in web and apps development, video conferencing and digital signage. She was previously Digital Platforms Manager at Deakin University, Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft.AI, President of Linux Australia, and a voice open source specialist at Mozilla. In 2019, she was one of 16 people from across the world to be chosen to help shape a new branch of engineering at the Australian National University's 3A Institute, where she is now a PhD candidate researching voice data and ways to prevent and respond to bias.

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“Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s not going to go away. We can hate it, we can refuse it, we can have doubts. But it’s here – and maybe we can use it for our own purposes and our own workflows in our institutions.” Dr Ines Vodopivec is convinced that AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t a novelty bolted onto library systems; it’s already reshaping users’ expectations and our definitions of data, and the workflows that connect the two.

Ines began her career in a Franciscan monastery in Slovenia, cataloguing 16th Century manuscripts, and has since then moved between librarianship, restoration and digitisation. Today, she is a digital‑heritage leader and Secretary General of AI4LAM whose career spans deputy directorship at Slovenia’s National and University Library, roles with UNESCO’s Memory of the World and the Europeana Network Association board.

In early February 2026, on a whirlwind tour of GLAM institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, she stopped by State Library Victoria to deliver a presentation that explored practical case studies for AI implementation in libraries across Europe and the US, including the National Library of Norway, Standford University Libraries and Bibliothèque National de France.

Alongside the promise of AI, she weighs ethics, access and the realities of staff skills, arguing for AI literacy and cross‑sector collaboration so libraries can remain trusted, user‑centred infrastructures.

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From the dial‑up days of 1993 to today’s data‑rich cultural landscape, historian and technologist Tim Sherratt has been rewiring how we see public collections. In this SLV Lab Conversation with State Library Victoria's Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray, Tim retraces a 30-year career so far shaped by dashboards and digitisation, political interventions and playful data experiments – a body of generous, open practice that treats interfaces, notebooks and APIs as scholarship in their own right. Along the way, he champions sector collaboration and the courage to experiment, and sharing his code and thought process so others can build on them.

About Tim Sherratt:
Calling Tim Sherratt a historian undersells him slightly. Calling him a hacker does the same. Over the past thirty years, historian and hacker Tim Sherratt has moved between research, cultural institutions and code, building tools that sit in the space between official infrastructure and individual curiosity. In 1993, in the early days of the web, he worked on the Australian Science Archives Project based at the University of Melbourne, which led to the development of Australia’s first archives website. This sparked his interest in GLAM collections and how the affordances of the then fledgling web could allow people to access history and communicate about it in different ways.

In 2007, while at the National Archives of Australia, Tim realised that applying computational methods to collections could open new avenues for analysis and exploration – an insight that became a major turning point in his career. Since then, his projects have ranged from dashboards (PROV Data, NAA Digitisation) and searchable digitised journals, to political interventions (The Real Face of White Australia, Historic Hansard) and playful data experiments (Operation Random Words, redacted). Most recently, he was Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra, and before that, Manager of National Library of Australia’s online research portal Trove.

At the centre of Tim’s practice nowadays is the GLAM Workbench, a sprawling, carefully documented collection of scripts, notebooks and examples designed to help people work with data from galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Workbench reflects his philosophy: that institutions cannot do everything themselves, and that access depends on a commitment to openness.

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We caught up with Dr Fiannuala (Finn) Morgan to talk about her fascinating project, Historic Fires Near Me – an experimental visualisation of nineteenth century bushfire reporting which forms part of her ongoing research reconstructing Australian bushfire records from 1850 to 1900. The idea was sparked by the devastation of the Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 and the troubling media narratives that downplay the growing severity of bushfires in Australia. Finn wanted to dig deeper into the historical record to see what the past could tell us.

As a librarian by trade with a passion for literature, Finn turned to Trove’s enormous archive of newspapers and journals. To extract and synthesise this data, she taught herself to code, using a mix of techniques – from simple searches to more advanced methods like Named Entity Recognition. The result is a browser-based tool that reveals where fires occurred and how often, across the colonies, over a fifty-year span.

In this conversation with SLV LAB’s Innovation Lead, Sotirios Alpanis, Finn shares what inspired her research and how anyone can learn to wrangle messy cultural data as she did. She also spoke about the distinct fire histories of different Australian colonies and the ways fire was used as a tool of colonisation in Victoria.

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Galleries. Libraries. Archives. Museums. Every day, artists and cultural workers face tough ethical calls on AI. Could artists show us a new way forward?

What if ethics wasn’t about ticking boxes, but about how we act, care and respond in the moment? In their new book Decentring Ethics: AI art as method (Open Humanities Press, 2025), Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde explore how artists using AI are raising new questions about responsibility and creativity. The book challenges the idea of ethics as a fixed code, instead showing how it plays out in real practice.

In the following podcast recording with Vanessa and Jasmin, we discuss how the GLAM sector – galleries, libraries, archives and museums – navigates these ethical choices, and how artists and arts workers can help us imagine new ways forward.

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There's a common misconception that assistive technologies only benefit a few – namely those with special access needs. However, innovations like voice assistants, text-to-speech and captions are things most of us use everyday, and at some point in our lives we or someone we know will rely on assistive technologies.

Dr Scott Hollier, CEO & co-founder of the Centre For Accessibility Australia, joins us to discuss digital access tools and creative approaches that make digital spaces easier to navigate. He shares how early design choices, strong accessibility standards and lived experience can shape richer online projects, including the Library’s award-winning Mouthful of Dust web experience.

The conversation looks at emerging guidelines, the pros and cons of AI-driven accessible tech and the vital role libraries play in protecting information integrity while opening access to more people.

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