Automated Archival Descriptions with Federated Intelligence of LLMs

Enforcing archival standards requires specialized expertise, and manually creating metadata descriptions for archival materials is a tedious and error-prone task. This work aims at exploring the potential of agentic AI and large language models (LLMs) in addressing the challenges of implementing a standardized archival description process. To this end, we introduce an agentic AI-driven system for automated generation of high-quality metadata descriptions of archival materials. We develop a federated optimization approach that unites the intelligence of multiple LLMs to construct optimal archival metadata. We also suggest methods to overcome the challenges associated with using LLMs for consistent metadata generation. To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of our techniques, we conducted extensive experiments using a real-world dataset of archival materials, which covers a variety of document types and formats. The evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility of our techniques and highlight the superior performance of the federated optimization approach compared to single-model solutions in metadata quality and reliability.