<b>AI Innovations Towards Inclusive Access to Archives</b>: Presentation for International Archives Week 2025

This presentation, AI Innovations Towards Inclusive Access to Archives, was delivered by Niklas Zimmer (Digital Scholarship and Data Curation Manager at FCTEC) during International Archives Week 2025 (#IAW2025), hosted by the University of Pretoria Museums Archive on 6 June 2025. The talk formed part of a larger, week-long programme themed "#ArchivesAreAccessible", coordinated by the International Council on Archives (ICA).

The presentation explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) can transform archival access, moving beyond digitisation to build inclusive, machine-readable, and human-usable collections. Core topics include:

• The accessibility imperative in digital archives
• Key technologies within IDP: OCR/HTR, NLP, semantic tagging
• Real-world case studies on government registers, theses, and newspapers
• Ethical and strategic considerations in automation
• Practical steps for integrating IDP into archival workflows

Notably, this presentation was delivered remotely via videoconferencing during Day 2 of the Technical Training on Digitisation for the Preservation of Documentary Heritage in Africa, co-hosted by Makerere University and FCTEC, in Kampala, Uganda. The workshop programme was updated to include this presentation at 15:00 EAT on 6 June 2025, delivered live from the College of Computing and Information Sciences (CoCIS).