Say hello to your AI Archivist of the future

How generative AI applications will change how we access digital archives

Today I'm giving a talk at the University of Glasgow about digital archives for business historians. One of the things I started thinking about as I was preparing this talk was the fact that, going forward, when we will research born-digital archives in the future, we may be engaging with an AI archivist.

We could probably already have AI archivists – that does not mean that you won’t have a human with oversight of the technology, but that you won’t be solely dealing with human archivists.

An AI-generated image for a post about AI

It's also been clear for several years that humans would not be able to deal with the overwhelming amount of digital sources that are likely to be archived in the future, especially if the collections are not clearly structured and do not come through records management processes. In fact, there is a “digital heap” – digital data that has accumulated over the years when there were few to no archival tools available to manage the transfer of digital materials into archives. While tools existed to look for known sensitive data – phone numbers, social security numbers, email and postal addresses – there was no way to identify problematic content and information that could not be made available without having a human read through all of it. Given the volume and sheer disjointedness of some digital collections, this was not going to be feasible.