A Look Inside How AI Would Work in the LIbrary of Congress w/ Carl Watts

A Look Inside How AI Would Work in the LIbrary of Congress w/ Carl Watts

From Data Unchained by Hammerspace

December 19, 2025 · 37 min · Episode 102

About this episode

Molly Presley interviews Carl Watts about managing AI in the Library of Congress and the challenges of preserving vast data collections.

In this episode of Data Unchained, host Molly Presley is joined by Carl Watts of the Library of Congress for a deep dive into what it takes to manage and preserve one of the largest and most complex data environments in the world. Carl shares firsthand insight into overseeing more than 150 petabytes of historical data, navigating large scale tape migrations, and confronting the governance, copyright, and operational challenges that come with applying AI to national archives. The conversation explores whether artificial intelligence can responsibly unlock siloed collections across text, audio, video, and web archives, and what it truly costs to move, protect, and future proof America’s digital memory at petabyte scale. Cyberpunk by jiglr | https://soundcloud.com/jiglrmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People in this episode

Host: Molly Presley

Guest: Carl Watts

Topics covered

  • AI
  • data management
  • national archives
  • digital preservation
  • copyright
  • governance

Keywords

  • AI
  • Library of Congress
  • data preservation
  • historical data
  • tape migrations
  • digital memory
  • national archives

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Library of Congress

More episodes of Data Unchained

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Data Unchained podcast page.