Abstract / topic summary
The Center of Community Archives (Centrum Archiwistyki Społecznej) hosts over 250,000 unique archival materials from more than 400 community archives on the zbioryspoleczne.pl portal. To open this rich Polish heritage to a global audience, our team spent a year implementing automatic AI translation to create an English version of all published collections.
What started as a straightforward AI integration quickly became a rollercoaster of cloud billing and technical problem-solving. In this session, we will share practical lessons learned from deploying automated processes that involve AI use at scale. We will walk through our initial, alarmingly high cost estimates and how they turned out to be dramatically overblown. We will also share a cautionary tale of pay-as-you-go cloud systems, detailing a system bug that temporarily spiked our costs, and how a massive influx of user data into our Open Archiving System (OSA) half a year later forced us to find another optimization to keep the project financially sustainable.
Beyond the financial and architectural hurdles, we will explore the UX challenges of the portal, focusing on how we maintain transparency by letting users know the text is AI-generated, alongside our findings on the overall quality of AI translations for historical community metadata.
Speaker summaries
Ewa Majdecka
Dr. Ewa Majdecka is a sociologist, researcher, and digital product manager with over a decade of experience at the intersection of digital technology and the cultural sector. Since 2021, she has led the Digital Tools Development Department at the Centre of Community Archives (CAS), overseeing the maintenance and development of the Open Archiving System (OSA) and the zbioryspoleczne.pl portal. She initiated the Community Testers Group, engaging community archivists in software testing and participatory development of digital tools. Since the launch of zbioryspoleczne.pl in 2022, she and her team have continuously developed the platform, making it easier for community archives to share their collections and for users to discover them.
Wojciech Budzisz
Wojciech Budzisz is a software engineer with over 15 years of experience spanning a diverse range of organizations. Throughout his career, he has delivered solutions for small businesses, NGOs, academic and public institutions, as well as multinational corporations. With a versatile technical background, his expertise encompasses distributed systems, backend, web and mobile development. Wojciech has been deeply involved with the Open Archiving System (OSA) since 2017, when he co-developed its initial web release at the KARTA Center Foundation, where the project originated. Since then, he has been one of the core contributors to OSA and zbioryspoleczne.pl portal.
