In the field of digital preservation, artificial intelligence has the potential to innovate how archivists and collection managers work. From archives and libraries to historical collections and digital museums, AI is helping professionals process and interpret vast amounts of information. With smarter metadata and improved organization tools, tasks that once required hours of manual effort can now be completed in moments, allowing humans to focus more on nuance and interpretation. “Archiving” brings to mind a world of boxes, binders, and physical artifacts, but digital archiving is entering a new era. AI isn’t replacing archivists or digital preservationists, but rather elevating and vastly expanding their work and opening new opportunities to connect people with the stories and data that define their organizations.
The Game-Changer: Intelligent Metadata Creation
What once took hours for human professionals can sometimes now take only minutes. Cataloging and chronicling collections has always been a time-intensive process for archivists – both physical and digital. Now, AI can automatically generate standardized select sets of metadata from digital assets, enabling teams to easily extract details like names, dates, and locations from documents, images, and media files. This process isn’t just faster, it’s more comprehensive and consistent than manual cataloging, creating a more reliable foundation for research, communication, and storytelling.
Machine learning tools apply the same rules across massive datasets, helping organizations and historians build archives that are easier to search and maintain over time.
Enhanced Searchability
AI can provide content analysis that dramatically improves discoverability and surface information in archival materials that might otherwise remain hidden. Within seconds, AI can extract text from documents, identify faces and places in photographs, and generate descriptions of visual content.
While not perfect, it creates valuable starting points from which digital archivists can edit and enhance, thus allowing people to explore items like membership records, medical society publications, or decades of board meeting materials that would have been buried in digital silos. This level of accessibility empowers institutions to rediscover their own histories. At HistoryIT, we’ve seen how AI-driven archives help nonprofits, schools, and corporations to trace organizational milestones, inform leadership decisions, and reveal patterns that support future planning – and to do so in a much more efficient way.
When organizations have structured, well-preserved digital collections, they gain the ability to use their history as a strategic asset. Leadership teams can draw from this information to guide planning, strengthen fundraising initiatives, and build authentic connections with stakeholders through the power of their shared legacy. Accessible, well-organized archives protect the past while actively shaping how institutions tell their stories and plan for the future.
The Human Touch Remains Essential
Even with all of its capabilities, digital archives cannot – and must not – be built on AI alone. Human input and oversight is required. Algorithms are not able to fully interpret the context behind a photo or verify that a name is being assigned to the right person, especially in decades- or centuries-old documents. Archivists and digital preservation specialists bring the knowledge, sensitivity, nuance and institutional understanding needed to ensure accuracy and meaning.
Understanding organizational context and making nuanced curatorial decisions relies on the human touch to build the bridge between data and the narrative. AI can provide an initial analysis of the data, then human professionals take over to validate results, correct mistakes, and create digital archives that are not only searchable, but also trustworthy.
The Future of Preservation
We are in a new era of digital preservation. The integration of AI in the archival field does not signal “human vs. machine,” but rather human and machine. They work together so that AI does the heavy lifting of discovering and sorting, allowing professionals to focus on what they do best: providing stewardship of organizations’ past to create digital archives and museums that reflect the depth and diversity of human experience.
At HistoryIT, the partnership between human specialists and artificial intelligence is already transforming how organizations preserve their legacies. AI accelerates technical and repetitive processes, and human insight ensures those efforts remain grounded in care, accuracy, and purpose. The result is a future where technology amplifies, rather than diminishes, the human role in accurately safeguarding history.
Dr. Kristen Gwinn-Becker is a professional historian, digital strategist and established thought leader in the field of digital preservation. As the Founder and CEO of HistoryIT, she holds a PhD in U.S. History from George Washington University and has worked for over 20 years in software development. Kristen is a published author, accomplished scholar and experienced public speaker, including her TEDx talk on the Future of History.
