AI-Powered Digital Archive for Cultural Heritage

A cultural heritage organization needed a way to preserve and catalog thousands of historical artifacts, documents, and media files. Their existing process was entirely manual, with metadata scattered across spreadsheets and physical records. Finding a specific item could take hours.

I built an AI-driven digital archive that automates cataloging and makes the entire collection searchable in seconds.

Staff uploads media (photos, videos, documents) through a simple web interface

Gemini processes each item, extracting metadata: dates, descriptions, categories, people, locations

The system auto-generates tags and cross-references related items

Everything is stored in a searchable database with full-text and semantic search

Automated metadata extraction powered by Gemini

Semantic search across the entire collection

Multi-format support (images, video, PDFs, audio)

Role-based access for researchers, curators, and public visitors

Export tools for academic citations and reports

AI: Gemini

Backend: Python

Database: Firebase

Search: Custom semantic search pipeline

Cataloging time reduced from 45 minutes per item to under 3 minutes

Entire collection searchable for the first time in the organization's history

Public access portal launched, increasing community engagement by 5x