GLOW-Ready (Getting Government Archives GenAI-Ready) Workshop 1

Location: Online

👉 Read the workshop report: GLOW-Ready Workshops Report

About the project

GLOW-Ready: Getting Government Archives GenAI-Ready for Users is a research project led by Loughborough University, working with partners including The National Archives, the Cabinet Office, PRONI, the National Library of Wales, and the Intellectual Property Office. The project builds on earlier LUSTRE/GLOW projects, which started in 2022.

Government archives hold born-digital records (emails, documents, audio, and video) that are vital for public accountability, historical understanding, and civic participation, yet they remain difficult to access and use at scale. Driven by the rise of generative AI (GenAI), users of these archives increasingly expect conversational discovery, rapid synthesis, and transparent provenance (what a record is, where it came from, and how an answer was produced). Archives and Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) teams need practical, user-informed ways to adapt their services responsibly, while respecting confidentiality, privacy, and other constraints.

To address these issues, the project is running three workshops bringing together archival and KIM professionals with academic researchers, journalists, and public users of archives; producing a practical guidance pack and training materials; and building and testing a secure, citation-grounded, RAG archival discovery prototype.

Who the workshops are for

The workshop will bring together people who use archives (including government archives): academic researchers, journalists, family historians and genealogists, KIM professionals, and anyone with an interest in accessing official records. Speakers are invited because of their direct experiences and insights as users – what they look for, how they look for it, what helps them find it, and what gets in the way.

What the workshops will cover

The workshop will combine keynote addresses, short presentations, roundtable discussions, and structured breakout groups. It will focus on:

• Understanding user needs and expectations
• AI-assisted discovery in practice
• Identifying priorities for AI-assisted government archives
• Issues of trust, transparency, sensitivity, and responsible access

Workshop agenda

13:00 – 13:10 | Welcome and Introduction 

Project overview, objectives of the workshop, and structure of the day 

Speaker: Prof Lise Jaillant, Loughborough University 

13:10 – 13:45 | Session 1: AI-Assisted Archival Discovery in Practice 

13:10 – 13:20 Prof Giovanni Colavizza, University of Copenhagen / University of Bologna 

Relay: Evidence-Linked Retrieval for Archival Discovery 

13:20 – 13:30 Dr Frédéric Clavert, University of Luxembourg 

Chatbots as Producers of Archives — the Example of Prompts Referring to the Historical Past 

Presentation Slides: Frédéric Clavert-View slides

13:30 – 13:45 Q&A 

13:45 – 14:15 | GLOW-Ready Team Presentation 

Prof Lise Jaillant, Loughborough University 
Dr Matthew Kidd, Loughborough University 
Dr Lingjia Zhao, Loughborough University 
Dr Haibin Cai, Loughborough University 

14:15 – 14:50 | Roundtable Discussion

14:50 – 15:00 | Break 

15:00 – 15:45 | Session 2: Searching and Using Archives at Scale 

15:00 – 15:10 Glen Layne-Worthey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 

Beyond Discovery: Scholarly Primitives for Future Research 

15:10 – 15:20 Prof Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex 

AI, the User Interface and the Representation of Data 

15:20 – 15:30 Dr Christopher R. Roast, Sheffield Hallam University 

Interacting with Scale – Believing and Knowing 

15:30 – 15:45 Q&A 

15:45 – 16:20 | Breakout Discussions 

User Expectations and Priorities for AI-Assisted Archives 

16:20 – 16:50 | Keynote 

16:20 – 16:40 Prof Paul Gooding, University of Glasgow 

If you build it, who (or what) will come? The User Studies Gap in AI and Archives Research 

16:40 – 16:50 Q&A 

16:50 – 17:00 | Closing Remarks