> I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.

That wall label was an indirection itself.

To be fair, they did warn at the top: I was asked to speak to you about how [...] AI technologies might inpact the ways in which museum collections are managed. I am going to take a round-about route to get there.

So not wall labels, midway down is: Wall labels, then, are not really the problem. They are the symptom of some broader challenges with the way that museums are organized and the ways in which they get things done.

If you search for those sentences and read the 4 paragraphs above it, you get the condensed version of the problem facing museum data. Basically, they have collections management systems but no one wants to do a bunch of data entry, and when they do, they don't use standards, or consistent naming conventions or semantic labeling for it. And points out: These are not technical problems.

The tie in to how ML/AI can help is a couple paragraphs below it. Basically, please don't use AI to generate narrative wall labels even if the curators are too lazy to organize their collections of researched object information. Also, don't hook commercial LLMs and chatbots to the collections management systems, which contain personal and private donor data. Do use text and image recognition for extracting structured data and object tagging -- for internally use only, and reviewed by humans -- and add it to the museums collection management system.

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jrowen 2 days ago | parent [-]

It was around the "10,000 unlabeled pieces of paper" part that my question became, "is it really important to save all this?" Especially in the context of a design museum that isn't particularly interested in unique works?

I agree that AI should not be used "if the curators are too lazy to organize their collections of researched object information." Just get rid of it. Boom. Done.

I appreciate people that archive and preserve things but that makes a lot more sense when there's like 5 scrolls to be found from an entire century. In the world of infinite data streams there's an almost comical futility to it imo. If the people don't care enough about it, using AI to create more volumes of data on it is just wild.

Curation nowadays is about the purge, the filter.

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mcphage 2 days ago | parent [-]

> If the people don't care enough about it, using AI to create more volumes of data on it is just wild.

They do care about it—they cared about it enough to get it, store it, preserve it. But they’re not good at storing the context around it—it’s like they care about it, but don’t care about why they care about it?

> Curation nowadays is about the purge, the filter.

I agree there’s value in that, but there’s also value in understanding the meaning behind what we keep.

	▲	jrowen a day ago \| parent [-]
		I often have a vision in my head of a library (museum?) archive in a basement. Every so often someone comes down with some books that they want to keep but don't know exactly what to do with at the moment. Over time, of course, it becomes a big mess that is useful to nobody, and the task of making it useful grows and grows. I think this applies to a lot of things in contemporary life. Today, we can always move forward. Everything around us is pulling us forward. The tendency to hold onto things makes sense, but it's largely becoming hoarding. If you're saving something, you should be damn sure that it's special and you're doing it for a reason, with intention and follow through. Otherwise, just move on, let it go.