Curators in the loop: human-centred AI for the digital curation of cultural heritage collections 

The CAIR 2027 workshop (Curators in the loop: human-centred AI for the digital curation of cultural heritage collections) will take place as a half-day, in-person event co-located with the 21st International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC27) on February 9, 2027. 

Digital curation of cultural heritage collections is increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence: metadata is generated by models, texts transcribed by handwriting recognition, entities linked automatically, descriptions drafted by large language models. Each step reshapes the curator's role; often silently, and rarely by design.

The prevailing framing of "human-in-the-loop" collapses to the curator as reviewer of model output, understating the interpretive labour, disciplinary craft, and community accountability that curation practice carries. Responding to the IDCC27 theme, "FAIR DO's: Centring People in the Stewardship and Curation of Digital Objects," this workshop convenes work that pushes past oversight toward a richer account of curator-AI collaboration, as a design problem, an empirical research problem, and a governance problem.

Important dates

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

• Submission deadline: 11 December 2026

• Notification to authors: 15 January 2027

• Camera-ready due: 22 January 2027

• Workshop: 9 February 2027 (morning), Lisbon