Weeknote #21: Finishing line
Edinburgh's annual week of Summer arrived in time for the marathon festival and the end of exams. Sighs of relief all round and it felt good to spend time outside.
What happened this week?
The final stage of our CRM tender completed this week with in-person demos from potential digital partners. These were time-consuming but meeting in person is absolutely worthwhile for a project that will live or die by how people work together. It's been a long process, but I feel more confident about the technology route we've chosen - and finding someone great to lead the programme.
I had a couple of difficult interactions with colleagues this week caused by everyone feeling a little bit overwhelmed and me pushing for answers at the wrong time. After taking a breath, it was good to follow up to talk through what went wrong and how to reduce pressure.
It was great to catch-up with Hugh Wallace after our usual Saturday park run. He's been tinkering with Claude Desktop and I'll keep badgering him to write up his experience and showcase some great 'mini-apps'. The different strands of AI work at the Library should include similar small-scale experiments, alongside project-based work and rolling out tools for all staff.
The rise of machine-driven traffic is opening up some interesting conversations around the limits of access across the cultural sector. With the University of Virginia Archival AI Protocol aiming to provide “a practical standard governing how artificial intelligence systems may access and use archival collections", questions are being asked about how and when to allow AI access to collections. This post, Provenance without context, from archivist Andrew Potter, examines the protocol's effectiveness in the case of the semantic search layer Die Zeit built on top digitised images of Nazi Party membership cards. The tension between placing conditions on certain types of access and the need to protect the digital commons and "be more Library" is surfacing across different areas of my work. (see also: Library and Archives 101: AI and the False Promise of Control).
Andrew Potter
Linked to the above, the Economist is building separate web infrastructure for humans and for AI. Similarly, AWS are redesigning cloud infrastructure around AI demands, decoupling compute from storage to accommodate bursts in traffic from agentic (i.e bot) traffic (h/t Ash Mann). There's a central question here around public funding for this type of research infrastructure and I'm not sure the non-human traffic will stop seeking access to all sources of data without additional controls.
I was feeling very under the weather at the end of the week, but survived a trip to the dentist and managed to churn through the to-do list on Friday.
The week concluded with a Project Board for the UK Web Archive. Progress has been slow following the British Library cyber attack, but we can now see the finish line for restoring public access.
Interesting things
- Slightly shorter than the Pope's 42,000 words, Matt Jukes identifies where he Ain't Inclined to use AI.
- Another Pope (Richard) on the problem with use cases when tackling complexity: "Rather than seeing chaos as something to be eliminated, the active management of chaos should be seen as a delivery tool."
- ACMI's Lucie Paterson on creating a digital label system for their latest exhibition. I'm keen to follow up with the team on their in-house Whisper speech-to-text pipeline (something we experimented with through the FutureScot AI Challenge).
- Is AI profitable yet? Some scary big numbers.
- An interesting post on emotionally intelligent people and the risk of burn-out in toxic environments: "Emotionally intelligent people tend to believe, with a sincerity that is both their strength and their vulnerability, that things can be better."
- Jonathan Liew questioning why people are still on X: "We should start to stigmatise X usage for what it really is: a small and selfish part in making the world measurably worse."
- Ash Mann's reflections on messy infrastructure point to some familiar tech and cultural challenges:
No shared visibility or understanding of what their core systems actually are, or how they connect to each other (or don't); an historic (and perhaps current) ad-hoc, departmental-level approach to adopting new systems (often with no clear link to strategy); fragmented data; idiosyncratic (and often frustrating) ways of working that have grown around all the weirdness; a lack of ownership or understanding at a senior level.
Watching, listening, reading, doing
📖 Every weeknote I think: less phone, more reading.
📺 The Kylie documentary on Netflix was saved by Nick Cave's appearance half way through (although only the skip button could redeem the final part). I enjoyed the first episode of Dear England with Joseph Fiennes providing an uncanny embodiment of Sir Gareth.
🎧 BBC 6 Music's tribute to Dylan on his 85th birthday provided a nice backdrop to a sunny Sunday. The new Future Islands album is growing on me.
🏃 I enjoyed playing support crew for various runners across the Edinburgh marathon events. My daughter got a new PB in the 2k race, but the heat on Sunday destroyed most pre-race plans. Some great footage here which makes Edinbugrh look amazing and documents the slow slide from "let's smash it" to "just get it done".
