Share Family Initiative has joined AI4LAM as a Founding Member
We are delighted to announce that the Share Family Initiative has joined AI4LAM as a Founding Member. As an international Linked Open Data ecosystem that connects libraries, archives, museums, and consortia worldwide, Share Family brings extensive expertise in collaborative metadata management, knowledge graphs, bibliographic services, and semantic technologies. Their commitment to high-quality, interoperable, and machine-actionable metadata aligns closely with AI4LAM’s mission to support the responsible and effective use of artificial intelligence across the cultural heritage sector.
The Share Family Initiative is a collaborative Linked Open Data (LOD) ecosystem connecting libraries, archives, museums, and consortia worldwide.
Supported by its international member community, it is built on BIBFRAME, compatible with IFLA LRM, developed with @Cult, and advocated by Casalini Libri. Share Family tenants include Share-VDE, NatBib, Share Catalogue, and Parsifal.
Casalini Libri is an international bibliographic agency and leading provider of library services. Together with the Share Family community, it supports the development of sustainable, interoperable, and community-driven infrastructures that improve the discovery, accessibility, and reuse of cultural heritage information.
The Share Family Initiative is actively exploring and implementing AI technologies within bibliographic workflows, while ensuring that cataloguers remain at the centre of decision-making processes. Within the Share Family LOD Platform infrastructure, AI is used to enrich sparse entity descriptions and assist in identifying contributor roles in legacy bibliographic records. These capabilities complement established cataloguing standards and practices rather than replacing them. Importantly, all AI-generated suggestions remain transparent, traceable, and subject to human review and validation.
In addition, Casalini Libri is piloting an LLM-based tool designed to automatically analyse ebooks and electronic journal issues, creating chapter- and article-level resources, identifying page ranges, and generating descriptive metadata. This helps streamline workflows and accelerate metadata creation while maintaining high-quality standards.
More broadly, AI is being evaluated across a range of bibliographic agency processes, from cataloguing support to metadata quality control. This work reflects a community-driven and library-led approach that views AI as a tool for enhancing professional expertise rather than substituting it.
According to Matias Frosterus, the Chair of SVDE and Share Family Advisory Council,
Share Family is delighted to join AI4LAM! Effective and responsible use of AI is extremely important for the future of the cultural heritage sector, and, reciprocally, open linked data and knowledge graphs are extremely important for the future of AI. Share Family Initiative is built around the idea of sharing high-quality, machine-actionable metadata, and this can be used to provide a dependable framework for AI.
We are pleased to welcome the Share Family Initiative to the AI4LAM community and look forward to exchanging knowledge, experiences, and best practices as we collectively explore the opportunities and challenges of AI in the cultural heritage sector.
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