FAUK’S FOCUS ON AI – a revelation!

FAUK’s SPRING meeting held online on 14th March 2025 was very well attended and included a wider number of staff from our Member archives for 2 special presentations designed to ‘Focus on AI’

Archivists and cataloguers from across the UK joined the event to listen to 2 presentations looking at AI tools and their potential for the moving image archives.
1. Francis Jones (Head of Heritage & Archive, Northern Ireland Screen)  presented ‘Practical AI for Moving Image Archives’ the case study of NIS’s proof-of-concept project to evaluate the use of AWS Transcribe and Bedrock for generating captions, AI chapter generations and meaningful video summaries from archive media files, with the aim of streamlining the process of creating accurate, time-synced captions and summaries, enhancing accessibility, as well as improving user engagement.
2. Alastair Bell & Ann Cameron, (respectively, Head of Moving Image, Sound & Music Collections and Curator, National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive) shared experience working on their ‘Moving Images’ project (as a finalist in the FutureScot AI Challenge competition 2024) to create a proof of concept discovery layer on collections, using AI tools to generate description and supply data for browsing tools. Issues covered include copyright & ethics, quality of data created, the search and browse interface experience and next steps for moving image collections.
There’s no doubt these projects have been fascinating introductions into working with the ever developing innovative world of AI technology. Going forward, there are tremendous opportunities to use AI in moving image archives but feedback, at the moment, from our speakers was that human review is still crucial!
For many attendees, this was their first taste of AI technology being used and we are grateful to Francis, Alistair and Ann for their time and enthusiasm in making the development and prospective use of AI more understandable.
A recording of these presentations will be available. Members please contact administrator@filmarchives.org.uk if you would like more information.