SLV LAB Conversations
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.
Episodes
In this Creative Technologist Talk, Elliott Bledsoe explored Australia’s new orphan works copyright scheme and what it might mean for cultural organisations and their publics. Alongside its timely discussion of the new legislation, Elliott's talk provides a helpful introduction to copyright and orphan works more broadly, opening up a wider conversation about access, reuse and public benefit in GLAM.
See omnystudio.com/listener...
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 mix...
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 V...
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-w...
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 ...
“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 d...
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 ...
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 researchreconstructing 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 th...
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 a...
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 rai...
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, a...
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