🔍 In this episode of Humans of AI, we speak with Daniel van Strien, researcher at Hugging Face and coordinator of Big GLAM, about how open collaboration, shared datasets, and a focus on the public good can help the cultural heritage sector build a healthier AI ecosystem.

Daniel shares his journey from studying library science to exploring how machine learning can empower libraries, archives, and museums. He discusses the Living with Machines project, his early experiments with FastAI, and how the Big GLAM initiative grew into a global effort to make cultural heritage datasets accessible for ethical and transparent AI development.

📌 HoAI Highlights

⏲️[00:00] Intro

⏲️[00:24] The Spark

⏲️[03:23] The Impact

⏲️[10:05] The Challenge

⏲️[13:45] The Future

⏲️[20:32] The Takeaway

The Spark

🗣️“Even something as simple as an image classifier can be incredibly useful for libraries — the challenge is adapting these tools to real-world GLAM contexts.”

The Impact

🗣️ “People often focus on models, but data is what really lasts. If we want AI to work for cultural heritage, we need to see datasets as shared infrastructure.”

The Challenge

🗣️ “Funding and copyright uncertainty are holding institutions back — we can’t expect the GLAM sector to lead innovation without long-term investment and legal clarity.”

The Future

🗣️“There’s an opportunity for libraries to collaborate on evaluation datasets and task-specific models that reflect their own values and missions.”

The Takeaway

🗣️ “Models might fade, but well-built datasets can last a decade — that’s where sustainable progress begins.”

📌 About Our Guests

Daniel van Strien | Hugging Face & Big GLAM

🌐 linkedin.com/in/danielvanstrien

🌐 https://huggingface.co/biglam

Big GLAM is a global open science initiative hosted on Hugging Face that gathers datasets from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to support ethical, community-driven machine learning. By fostering collaboration and transparency, Big GLAM helps cultural institutions engage with AI in ways that respect public values and strengthen the digital commons.

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