Heritage Professionals and AI: Reflections on Current and Future Practices

This paper aims to establish a tentative, minimal framework for the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in heritage collections with a particular focus on collections management and curation. We begin by summarising relevant scholarship on the need for a diverse and inclusive understanding of heritage, including the complexities that AI introduces. We then conduct qualitative fieldwork by drawing upon a sample of semi-structured interviews conducted with Swedish cultural heritage professionals in curatorial roles. Building on a more comprehensive understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that AI presents for cultural heritage collections, this article proposes a minimal working model to support successful technological implementation. We argue that such implementation requires a modular approach. Drawing on a small case study within the Swedish context, we outline a minimal framework composed of two core modules: (1) domain expertise and (2) collections as information and data.