Category: News
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Accelerating History: AI and Optical Character Recognition Seminar
We are excited to co-present with the University of Alberta Digital Scholarship Centre on some of the work we’ve been doing with OCR and vision language models! Description: From the 1990s to the 2010s, the pace of development in text and handwritten tech was steady, but over the last 2-3 years, advancements have accelerated dramatically.…
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Notes from a Library AI Research Visit at the University of Alberta
I spent the first two weeks of 2026 visiting the University of Alberta (UofA) Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC) for an informal exploratory period focused on knowledge exchange and relationship-building. The goal was to share Kula & UVic Libraries’ work integrating and teaching GenAI in academic library/archive contexts, learn from UofA’s staff, researchers, and students, and…
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Making Scanned Data Tables Usable with AI
Back in October 2025, Nick Rochlin, our Science and Data Librarian, sent me a folder of scans of data tables typed in the 1980s. A student had contacted Nick asking if there was an automated way to convert their paper data tables into a format that would allow for computational analysis. There didn’t seem to be…
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Exploring AI integrations in Libraries & Archives
I’m Chloë Farr, the Kula: Library Futures Academy Graduate Student Fellow in AI. I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Linguistics, and I am currently a PhD student in Computer Science at UVic. My background in humanities sometimes gives me some unique perspectives in Computer Science. Over the last few months, I’ve been deeply…
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Building Transnational Queer & Trans+ Connections
By Michael Radmacher, Transgender Archives Metadata Librarian A popular storytelling mechanism begins the story at the end of the tale. But what if the story doesn’t have an ending? This conundrum may be the point of Kula: Library Futures Academy, to be a catalyst for beginnings, not endings. So, for now, let’s buck the storytelling…
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KULA Postdoctoral Fellow Awarded Hannah Arendt Fellowship
Kula: Library Futures Academy is pleased to announce that Nathaniel Brunt, VPRI Aspiration 2030 & Kula Postdoctoral Fellow, has received the prestigious 2026 Hannah Arendt Fellowship awarded by the German state of Lower Saxony and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The grant application was sponsored by German librarian Lambert Heller, Head of the Open Science…
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Director Interview in Eurekalert
An interview with Kula Director Matt Huculak was featured in Eurekalert this week. Huculak talks about the hopes in founding the Kula: Library Futures Academy on research at the University of Victoria, including the student experience: Q: What are your hopes for the long-term impact of Kula on student learning and community engagement? Huculak: The…
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Kula Team Presents at ICA Barcelona 2025
Kula had two presentations accepted at the 2025 International Archives Conference held in Barcelona, Spain October 27-30. Director Matt Huculak and University Librarian Jonathan Bengtson presented a “Co-Lab” session in which global participants were asked to envision and share how libraries and archives can work more closely together in post-custodial / co-custodial, cultural heritage contexts. Dr. Nathaniel…
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Lambert Heller Awarded Inaugural International Visiting Fellowship
By Christian Schmidt, Kula Librarian Research Associate. In July 2025, Kula welcomed German librarian Lambert Heller as its first Visiting International Fellow. Lambert leads the Open Science Lab at Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) Hanover, the world’s largest library for technology and natural sciences. His team develops open-source software, researches digital infrastructure,…
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Kula Launch
The Kula: Library Futures Academy formally launched with a public event on September 15 & 16, 2025. Day 1 featured a series of moderated panel discussions. Speakers included University of Oxford Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden; Librarian and Archivist of Canada Leslie Weir; authors Lawrence Hill, Richard Van Camp and Esi Edugyan; UVic Chancellor Emerita Shelagh…