SNCA AI Lunch & Learn Panel "AI Projects at UNC Chapel Hill"

Presentation 1#Using AI for Transcription and Close Reading of Manuscript Collections Lydia Hendrick is a Graduate Assistant in Technical Services Special Collections at Wilson Library. She works on the Mellon-funded project "On the Books: AI-Assisted Collections" and is an MSLS student in the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Her career focus is in Special Collections and Public Libraries. Nancy Kaiser is a technical services archivist at Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She arranges and describes archival collections and for the last several years has been working on reparative description to make finding aids for manuscript collections more accessible to family history researchers and genealogists. She works with Lydia Hendrick on the Mellon grant. Presentation #2: Evaluating AI-Generated Image Descriptions for UNC Library’s Digital Repositories Deseree Stukes is the Software Quality Assurance Specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, where she develops and implements automated testing strategies for digital repositories and web applications. She also leads quality assurance efforts across multiple systems, ensuring usability, accuracy, and inclusive access to digital assets. In addition, her work focuses on accessibility compliance, including evaluating large language models for automated image description (alt-text) generation using WCAG standards and established image description guidelines. Ben Pennell is an applications analyst at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. He leads and contributes to the development of the special collections and institutional repositories for the Library, as well as the preservation technologies that support them. In the last few years, he has also worked on development of machine learning and LLM based tools to support archival workflows.