Alex brings a vast range of experience in Information Science, History and English to his role as Carnegie Mellon’s first digital archivist and we were grateful to pick his brains on how to go about building infrastructure and policies that will allow us to make portions of Hall’s digitised archival material available to scholars and the general public in the coming months.
Discussion ranged from best practice in the cultural heritage sector, to technical solutions for blocking impolite bots, to policy benchmarks and data poisoning, as we contemplated how to design systems and policies that fulfil SHAP’s two aims of wanting to facilitate wide and equitable access to these materials, while also avoiding harms (whether through the perpetuation of legacies of data racism, or through AI bot-facilitated commercial exploitation).
We are so grateful to have benefited from his, and other digital archivists’, expertise and guidance, as we seek to make Hall’s archives available via digitisation. Watch this space!