Artificial Intelligence for the Indexing and Research of Museum Collections

Description

The goal of this TRAIL is the interdisciplinary cataloging and research of museum collections using artificial intelligence (AI). This entails the sustainable digital capture of precise, structured information on museum objects, as well as providing open access to and linking metadata regarding creators, contexts of use, provenance, dating, materials, and object condition. It is designed for all community members involved in collection management. The project addresses the need for support in generating FAIR object metadata, as well as its analysis and interpretation by museums, which often operate with limited resources. To date, only a small portion of museum holdings is available in machine-readable form with sufficient depth for scholarly research, while the volume of research data continues to grow due to increasing interdisciplinarity.

In addition to more efficient object documentation, this TRAIL aims to use AI to generate new connections between artifacts. This reveals relationships that are difficult for human researchers to identify, leading to new research questions.

The TRAIL is based on the research project “AI in Museums,” funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony as part of the “zukunft.niedersachsen” program (01.01.2026–31.12.2027), and is part of the project’s dissemination strategy. The primary outcome of the TRAIL (1st project phase) is the methodological groundwork for the future regular operation of AI services in museums.