SLV LAB Conversations

State Library Victoria

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TECHNOLOGY

Explore emerging tech, digital experimentation and all things library-futures. SLV LAB is State Library Victoria's prototyping and innovation lab. We experiment with technology to open access to collections, data and spaces. In our Conversations series, we discuss emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures with artists, technologists and workers in the cultural sector.

20 MAY

The social life of mixed reality – Yoyo Munk

How can mixed reality technologies create emergent social experiences? Scientist-artist Yoyo Munk (US) joined SLV's Paula Bray and CEO Paul Duldig to discuss blending virtual geometries with shared physical space in their recent KAGAMI and Medusa projects. Yoyo asks how technological imperfections can evoke meaning, and explains their journey from scientist to artist by finding the signal in the noise. Together, they wonder how mixed reality might interact with library collections, and the potential for digital visualisations to not only reveal the dynamic evolution of knowledge archives, but to shape future collecting practices. This conversation was recorded in March 2025, a few months before Yoyo joined SLV LAB as its first Creative Technologist‑in‑Residence. His resulting project, In Memory | Of Being, was a mixed reality installation built from the Library’s digitised holdings: thousands of unidentified portraits, fragile glass‑plate negatives, vintage stereographs and oral history recordings. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

29 min
4 MAY

Building better AI speech tech with global voices – Kathy Reid

Voice assistants and auto-captions are everywhere now, but they can quickly fall apart when someone speaks with an accent the system wasn’t trained to recognise, or in a language it rarely “hears”. In this episode of the SLV LAB Conversations podcast, we were joined by technologist, linguist and researcher Kathy Reid who unpacked why that happens and what can be done about it. She introduces Mozilla Common Voice, a community-led project that collects speech in hundreds of languages and dialects. Kathy also talks through the Mozilla Data Collective and what it could mean for libraries and other cultural institutions facing constant scraping of online collections. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

54 min
20 APR

Mapping Planetary AI – Kate Crawford [lecture recording]

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems pull data from across the internet, library databases and our online presence, it generates a significant change in our relationship with knowledge. But what do we really know about this pervasive technology? Do our societies have robust guardrails in place to protect people and democracies, and have we reckoned with AI’s environmental impact? Join award-winning Professor Kate Crawford, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the social and political implications of AI, as she explores how AI is reshaping our societies, ecosystems and power structures with host Natasha Mitchell in State Library Victoria's 2024 For Future Reference lecture. Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her book Atlas of AI won multiple awards and was named one of the best books of 2021 by New Scientist and The Financial Times. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and is on show at MoMA from 2022-2024. Their latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1hr 21min
16 APR

Mozilla Common Voice – Kathy Reid [lecture recording]

On 18 March 2026, Kathy Reid delivered a lecture at State Library Victoria exploring Mozilla Common Voice, language bias in speech tech and Mozilla Data Collective’s approach to ethical data stewardship for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and technical communities. She has held several technical leadership positions, including roles in web and apps development, video conferencing and digital signage. She was previously Digital Platforms Manager at Deakin University, Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft.AI, President of Linux Australia, and a voice open source specialist at Mozilla. In 2019, she was one of 16 people from across the world to be chosen to help shape a new branch of engineering at the Australian National University's 3A Institute, where she is now a PhD candidate researching voice data and ways to prevent and respond to bias. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

42 min
11 MAR

How AI can help libraries – Ines Vodopivec [lecture recording]

“Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s not going to go away. We can hate it, we can refuse it, we can have doubts. But it’s here – and maybe we can use it for our own purposes and our own workflows in our institutions.” Dr Ines Vodopivec is convinced that AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t a novelty bolted onto library systems; it’s already reshaping users’ expectations and our definitions of data, and the workflows that connect the two. Ines began her career in a Franciscan monastery in Slovenia, cataloguing 16th Century manuscripts, and has since then moved between librarianship, restoration and digitisation. Today, she is a digital‑heritage leader and Secretary General of AI4LAM whose career spans deputy directorship at Slovenia’s National and University Library, roles with UNESCO’s Memory of the World and the Europeana Network Association board. In early February 2026, on a whirlwind tour of GLAM institutions in the Asia-Pacific region, she stopped by State Library Victoria to deliver a presentation that explored practical case studies for AI implementation in libraries across Europe and the US, including the National Library of Norway, Standford University Libraries and Bibliothèque National de France. Alongside the promise of AI, she weighs ethics, access and the realities of staff skills, arguing for AI literacy and cross‑sector collaboration so libraries can remain trusted, user‑centred infrastructures. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

58 min
18 FEB

Three decades of hacking and history – Tim Sherratt

From the dial‑up days of 1993 to today’s data‑rich cultural landscape, historian and technologist Tim Sherratt has been rewiring how we see public collections. In this SLV Lab Conversation with State Library Victoria's Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray, Tim retraces a 30-year career so far shaped by dashboards and digitisation, political interventions and playful data experiments – a body of generous, open practice that treats interfaces, notebooks and APIs as scholarship in their own right. Along the way, he champions sector collaboration and the courage to experiment, and sharing his code and thought process so others can build on them. About Tim Sherratt:Calling Tim Sherratt a historian undersells him slightly. Calling him a hacker does the same. Over the past thirty years, historian and hacker Tim Sherratt has moved between research, cultural institutions and code, building tools that sit in the space between official infrastructure and individual curiosity. In 1993, in the early days of the web, he worked on the Australian Science Archives Project based at the University of Melbourne, which led to the development of Australia’s first archives website. This sparked his interest in GLAM collections and how the affordances of the then fledgling web could allow people to access history and communicate about it in different ways. In 2007, while at the National Archives of Australia, Tim realised that applying computational methods to collections could open new avenues for analysis and exploration – an insight that became a major turning point in his career. Since then, his projects have ranged from dashboards (PROV Data, NAA Digitisation) and searchable digitised journals, to political interventions (The Real Face of White Australia, Historic Hansard) and playful data experiments (Operation Random Words, redacted). Most recently, he was Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra, and before that, Manager of National Library of Australia’s online research portal Trove. At the centre of Tim’s practice nowadays is the GLAM Workbench, a sprawling, carefully documented collection of scripts, notebooks and examples designed to help people work with data from galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The Workbench reflects his philosophy: that institutions cannot do everything themselves, and that access depends on a commitment to openness. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

37 min
15 JAN

Mapping colonial bushfires through historical newspapers – Fiannuala Morgan

We caught up with Dr Fiannuala (Finn) Morgan to talk about her fascinating project, Historic Fires Near Me – an experimental visualisation of nineteenth century bushfire reporting which forms part of her ongoing research reconstructing Australian bushfire records from 1850 to 1900. The idea was sparked by the devastation of the Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 and the troubling media narratives that downplay the growing severity of bushfires in Australia. Finn wanted to dig deeper into the historical record to see what the past could tell us. As a librarian by trade with a passion for literature, Finn turned to Trove’s enormous archive of newspapers and journals. To extract and synthesise this data, she taught herself to code, using a mix of techniques – from simple searches to more advanced methods like Named Entity Recognition. The result is a browser-based tool that reveals where fires occurred and how often, across the colonies, over a fifty-year span. In this conversation with SLV LAB’s Innovation Lead, Sotirios Alpanis, Finn shares what inspired her research and how anyone can learn to wrangle messy cultural data as she did. She also spoke about the distinct fire histories of different Australian colonies and the ways fire was used as a tool of colonisation in Victoria. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

40 min
28/10/2025

Creating a more accessible online world – Scott Hollier

There's a common misconception that assistive technologies only benefit a few – namely those with special access needs. However, innovations like voice assistants, text-to-speech and captions are things most of us use everyday, and at some point in our lives we or someone we know will rely on assistive technologies. Dr Scott Hollier, CEO & co-founder of the Centre For Accessibility Australia, joins us to discuss digital access tools and creative approaches that make digital spaces easier to navigate. He shares how early design choices, strong accessibility standards and lived experience can shape richer online projects, including the Library’s award-winning Mouthful of Dust web experience. The conversation looks at emerging guidelines, the pros and cons of AI-driven accessible tech and the vital role libraries play in protecting information integrity while opening access to more people. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

47 min
20/08/2025

Rethinking Ethics in the Age of AI – Vanessa Bartlett & Jasmin Pfefferkorn

Galleries. Libraries. Archives. Museums. Every day, artists and cultural workers face tough ethical calls on AI. Could artists show us a new way forward? What if ethics wasn’t about ticking boxes, but about how we act, care and respond in the moment? In their new book Decentring Ethics: AI art as method (Open Humanities Press, 2025), Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde explore how artists using AI are raising new questions about responsibility and creativity. The book challenges the idea of ethics as a fixed code, instead showing how it plays out in real practice. In the following podcast recording with Vanessa and Jasmin, we discuss how the GLAM sector – galleries, libraries, archives and museums – navigates these ethical choices, and how artists and arts workers can help us imagine new ways forward. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

40 min
30/04/2025

Why do libraries need innovation labs? – Paula Bray

What does an innovation "lab" look like inside a library – and why do other cultural institutions like galleries, archives and museums need them now? On 1 May 2025, on the cusp of launching SLV LAB at State Library Victoria, Ana Tiquia (Head of Innovation and Research, State Library Victoria) and Paula Bray (Chief Digital Officer, State Library Victoria) unpacked how labs help galleries, libraries, archives and museums keep pace with fast-moving technologies, by creating space for curiosity, experimentation and shared learning. Paula reflects on lessons from early digital work at the Powerhouse Museum and six years leading the State Library of NSW’s DX Lab – where inviting technologists and artists in, documenting experiments, and publishing openly helped ideas travel beyond one organisation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

24 min

10 Episodes

Explore emerging tech, digital experimentation and all things library-futures. SLV LAB is State Library Victoria's prototyping and innovation lab. We experiment with technology to open access to collections, data and spaces. In our Conversations series, we discuss emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures with artists, technologists and workers in the cultural sector.

Creator

State Library Victoria
Years Active

2K
Episodes

10
Rating

Clean
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© 2026 State Library Victoria
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SLV LAB Conversations