Jessica BrodeFrank

Jessica BrodeFrank (she/her) spent the last decade in cultural heritage institutions, running DAMS, digital humanities research, and digital curation.

She held positions at the Georgetown University Library, Adler Planetarium, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Smithsonian’s NAA, Gardens, NPG, and NMAAHC.

She leads the Chicago Collections Consortium portal as part of her role as a Clinical Professor and Digital Librarian with the University of Illinois Chicago.

Her research continues from her doctorate at the University of London, and focuses on crowdsourcing as a means of digital engagement, and the enrichment of metadata taxonomies with these diverse voices as a way towards inclusive search and access.

Jessica BrodeFrank will be speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2025 :

Incorporating STEM, AI, and Human Participation to Target Digital Literacy in Cultural Heritage

Cultural Organizations are spaces for discovery, innovation, interrogation, encouraging agency and exploration of not just objects but also the very missions of the organization. By adopting a mission around using collections items, crowdsourcing projects, and programming to expose digital literacy concepts like bias, algorithms, and more, institutions have a new ability to become essential to life-long learning geared towards this second quarter of the 21st century.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 directed the Institute of Museum and Library Services to explore ways to improve information literacy within communities. As acting director of IMLS at the time, Cyndee Laundrum stated, “we want to empower these trusted library and museum professionals who play a critical role in helping improve digital, financial, and health literacy to serve the needs of diverse communities.”

This session will look at lifelong learning, and participatory culture, in museums, archives, and libraries, providing examples of projects that have expanded access to collections, increased web accessibility through alt-text generation, and tackled digital literacy through hands-on use of AI models.