Digital Preservation Summit 2026: Securing Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age

From Archives to AI - Aggregating Legacy DAMS, Collections, and Repositories for Access and Preservation

Context:

• In 2026, as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, TRPL opens its doors, marking a historic moment to honor Roosevelt’s legacy and American history.
• TRPL is pioneering a new approach to AI in cultural institutions by using its DAM as trusted AI digital repositories - authoritative sources for every asset and metadata field the AI can access.
• Spanning 33 collections across 18 institutions, TRPL’s digitization effort combines advanced optical character definition (OCR), human-in-the-loop metadata curation, and precise asset governance to build a large language model that powers both a public AI search engine and an immersive conversational Roosevelt experience. This DAMS-centered approach ensures provenance, transparency, and ethical use of collections, while also supporting long-term digital preservation of assets, safeguarding both content and context for future generations.

Covering:

• How similar AI capabilities can be implemented without replacing existing systems, leveraging current DAMS, collections, and archival repositories to create a curated, institution-controlled AI model. 
• An approach that demonstrates that AI-driven access and digital preservation can go hand in hand, making trusted AI practical for other GLAM institutions, even with complex or legacy environments.
• The technical, ethical, and governance lessons learned when creating a first-of-its-kind LLM rooted entirely in curated institutional assets, perfectly timed to celebrate 250 years of the United States.