Officials at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO), and the Smithsonian Institution are looking to leverage AI technologies to ease pain points for their employees and more efficiently deliver government services.
During a hearing on Wednesday afternoon held by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, officials from the three organizations shared both current and potential future AI use cases.
“While it is important that our three witnesses today speak to measures they are taking to safeguard guard against potential harms, they are also, I think it’s important to note, using AI technology in their work to protect our country’s greatest treasures, advance scientific research, and improve public access to information,” committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said.
For example, the Library of Congress’s digital innovation division – known as LC Labs – has been investigating AI since 2018, and it has already shared the results of its research experiments with the public.
The Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, explained that the library is using a new AI tool that leverages machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) to help manage metadata and machine-readable text for digitized documents.
“OCR has increased the discoverability of more than 20 million historic American newspaper pages through the Chronicling America project,” Hayden said. “And building on that technology, users can also search those historic newspapers for photos using an application LC Labs rolled out in 2020 called Newspaper Navigator.”
Hayden explained that the library is also testing AI use cases “to increase efficiency and staff productivity.” For instance, its cataloging division is currently experimenting with the technology to help staff more efficiently process bibliographic information in catalog records.
“As the Library of Congress charges course forward, we plan to draw on our history of technological innovations and our rigorous development of standards and the input of our stakeholders and partners to align possible uses for the public,” Hayden said.
The GPO – which publishes, produces, and maintains materials for all three branches of government – is also looking to leverage AI through various potential use cases.
For instance, GPO is looking to use AI to improve its quality assurance process by automatically recognizing defects that a human inspector might miss.
GPO Director Hugh Halpern said that his office already uses a “rudimentary form” of this technology when producing the U.S. passport. The tech scans the pages that will become the identification page in the passport and looks “for variances that exceed the specifications for the material and rejects those pages that don’t conform to the standard.”
“AI technology has the potential to further refine this review, allowing the machines to learn what may constitute a natural variation that’s within the specification and what’s not,” Halpern said. “This has the potential to reduce defect rates, lower waste, and free up our quality assurance team to focus on solving bigger quality problems as they arise.”
Additionally, Halpern said AI offers great potential for supplementing GPO’s proofreading team as well.
As for the Smithsonian – which is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex – the institution is looking to leverage AI to improve the visitor experience, according to Meroë Park, the deputy secretary and chief operating officer at the Smithsonian.
One exciting initiative Park highlighted is the Smithsonian Data Science Lab’s work to address the gender data gap by developing a model that can “discover and correct women’s contributions mistakenly attributed to men in our collections.”
Additionally, Park said the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s AstroAI’ center has over 50 AI projects planned or underway, “creating excitement about our solar system and the universe itself.”
“Ultimately, AI is a tool. Used properly, it will allow the Smithsonian to expand our reach and our impact,” Park said. “Like any new technology, it comes with risks and the potential for unintended consequences. But by developing internal expertise and partnering with external experts, we can thoughtfully leverage AI both for the Smithsonian and for the American public.”
