2023 Keynote: Natalie Buda Smith
Connecting the Past to our Future: The Call for Resilience and Inclusivity in our Information Structures
As the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, which catalogs and manages over 179 petabytes of our cultural data, it is essential that the Library of Congress adapt, innovate, and continuously improve. Much resilience is needed to preserve the past and meet the needs of the present, let alone plan for the future. As information structures and data serve as the foundation for the explosion in machine learning and artificial intelligence, these structures and data also need to be resilient, accessible, and inclusive.
The library sciences are a foundational part of our digital history. In 1966, Library programmer Henriette Avram piloted the game-changing Machine-Readable Cataloging Record (MARC). In 2005, Peter Morville’s engagement with the Library of Congress sparked a change in how the Library centralizes access to our data and data structures. And in 2022, the Library released the congress.gov API to the general public, promoting transparency and access to the largest legislative data repository in the world.
Natalie Buda Smith will present this connection of the past to the present, and how building-in resilience, inclusivity, and accessibility prepares our fields for the work of the future.
