Ioana Crihana, Executive Director of ANBPR, participated as a keynote speaker at POST MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2025, an event organized by the Digital Transformation Council in partnership with COMUNICAȚII Mobile magazine and TelecomTV Romania on April 3, 2025 at Grand Hotel Continental, Bucharest.
At the event, Ioana Crihana showcased a presentation titled SHIFT – MAKING CULTURAL HERITAGE ACCESSIBLE FOR VULNERABLE GROUPS. A MOBILITY APPROACH FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE, which reflects the new dynamics of libraries thanks to the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and modern technological solutions.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies, libraries are migrating to a new destiny, making the transition from traditional cultural institutions to true dynamic laboratories of digital experiments that use artificial intelligence for accessibility, inclusion and creativity.
The audience was able to learn about the latest technological developments within the project SHIFT, such as digital stories adapted in various languages and with different style transfers, dynamic visualizations of paintings and artifacts or rewritings of old books in contemporary language, accessible to digital natives.
“We are practitioners who mediate technology and explain it to communities,” said Ioana Crihana. SHIFT transforms archives into interactive experiences using AI, haptic solutions and multimodal processing. Librarians are solution seekers, technology facilitators and designers of modern services for users.
The SHIFT project welcomes consumers of cultural goods by transforming static paintings into narrative sequences, old books into stories translated and narrated in the understanding of contemporary generations, and statues into objects enriched with technology, which can be explored remotely by visually impaired people, through haptic interfaces.
Transforming librarians into facilitators of modern technologies for heterogeneous audiences, ANBPR emphasizes the practical mediation of technology, encouraging libraries to become cultural spaces for testing and validating cutting-edge solutions.
At the end of April 2025, at the ASTRA County Library Sibiu and the “Lucian Blaga” University Sibiu, ANBPR will coordinate a series of technological demonstrations in which at least 10 libraries from the national library network will participate, interested in testing and adapting the tools developed within the SHIFT project.
Thus, the SHIFT project confirms that the future of libraries is not just about book deposits and traditional library services, but about modern services, cutting-edge technological solutions, accessibility and empathy – elements that contribute to a substantial reform of the cultural and creative industries.
