The secret to better AI is buried in analog archives

Historiq Founder and CEO Dean Serrentino and Chief Archivist Jay Bosanko were featured in The AI Journal on why analog archives may be one of the most underutilized—and most consequential—resources for the next era of AI. Their argument begins with a larger point: the value of archives is not only what they can teach machines, but what they can return to the public record.

Public memory can be skewed not only by what is censored or destroyed, but by what is left undescribed, undigitized, or hard to find.

That is why public access has to remain the goal. When collections remain unprocessed, important evidence can stay invisible even when it has been preserved. Archival standards and professional practice are what turn those materials into trustworthy, contextualized resources for researchers, educators, students, and communities.

The opportunity is not simply to move faster. It is to extend expert stewardship further than traditional staffing and funding models have allowed.

Innovation matters when it helps extend that stewardship, not when it shortcuts it. New tools and new partnerships should help archivists bring more history out of boxes and into public view while keeping institutional judgment, provenance, and access values at the center of the work.

Archives could make AI better. But the more consequential possibility is that AI-era demand could help close the long-standing gap between what archives hold and what institutions have had the resources to process and open.

That balance is the central opportunity: using new demand and new technology to support cultural heritage institutions without compromising the values that make their collections credible, durable, and publicly meaningful.

Read the full article: The secret to better AI is buried in analog archives (The AI Journal).