The National Archives and Records Administration expects to launch a generative artificial intelligence pilot in early 2025 to enhance how different groups of people find the information they need on the NARA website, Federal News Network reported Monday.
At the recent ACT-IAC ImaginationNation conference, Sheena Burrell, NARA’s former chief information officer, said the pilot will initially focus on applying GenAI to the Warren Commission documents and information related to President John Kennedy’s assassination.
Optical Character Recognition and Semantic Search
NARA is considering Google’s Vertex AI platform for the pilot. According to Burrell, who left the agency last week to assume the chief innovation officer at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Vertex enables optical character recognition, which allows people with different backgrounds to easily find needed information. The former CIO added that the pilot could enable semantic search on the National Archives catalog to deliver relevant search results.
“One of the things from a customer perspective that we’ve heard a lot is that sometimes people are not able to find what they’re looking for,” Burell said. “A middle schooler versus a person who is a trained archivist or a trained researcher. Those are two different types of experiences, and we want to be able to cater to both.”
NARA is also exploring other AI use cases, including reviewing, redacting and declassifying documents to reduce the time needed to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.
