Best AI for Archivists

The description backlog is one of the most persistent structural problems in archival practice. Collections sit processed but undescribed, or partially described, for years because writing finding aids is time-consuming work even when the intellectual decisions have already been made. The physical arrangement is done, the archivist understands what's there, but converting that understanding into a finding aid that meets professional standards takes hours that competing demands make hard to find.

AI tools have become genuinely useful for the description writing step in the last two years, in ways that matter for archivist workflows specifically. Not for the intellectual work of archival arrangement and appraisal, which requires professional judgment and can't be automated. But for the prose writing step that sits between "I know what this collection contains" and "there is a finding aid that researchers can use."

This guide covers three tools that address different parts of archival work, with a focus on what actually saves time in practice.

How I evaluated these tools

Archival work has specific professional standards that general-purpose AI reviews don't address.

DACS and archival description standards: Finding aids need to follow Describing Archives: A Content Standard. A useful AI tool needs to produce prose that fits within that framework rather than imposing a generic document structure.

Accuracy for archival description: A finding aid that misrepresents a collection is worse than no finding aid. I've looked at whether tools are transparent about what they don't know and whether the output is a reliable starting point for expert editing.

Research support communication: Archives serve researchers with varying levels of archival knowledge. Communications about holdings, access procedures, and reference services need to be accurate and clear across that range.

Handling of sensitive materials: Archives frequently hold restricted materials, sensitive personal records, and materials with complex access situations. Data handling for consumer AI tools is a concern.

1. Claude (claude.ai)

Claude is the most useful AI tool for archival description writing. Its combination of writing quality, ability to follow structural specifications, and flexibility for different document types makes it consistently valuable for the description backlog problem.

The finding aid workflow is the core use case. The practical approach: give Claude your processing notes, the series and subseries structure you've established, and a description of the collection's content and context. Ask it to draft the scope and content note, the biographical or organizational history note, and the series descriptions following DACS principles. It produces structured prose that fits the conventions of archival description. You review for accuracy and edit for your institution's specific voice and standards. The time savings on a substantial collection is real, hours rather than days.

For accession records, Claude helps draft the preliminary descriptions that go into your archival management system at acquisition. These don't need to be as thorough as a finished finding aid, but they do need to be accurate enough to support future processing decisions and donor commitments. Claude produces solid accession record prose from intake notes quickly.

Research correspondence is where Claude's ability to write clearly for different audiences matters. A researcher asking about a collection might be a graduate student encountering archival research for the first time or a specialist who knows the literature around a collection better than you do. Claude helps draft responses that are accurate, appropriately detailed, and calibrated to the researcher's apparent level of archival experience. That calibration used to require significant writing time; Claude handles it quickly when you describe the researcher's question and background.

Donor correspondence, including acquisition letters, processing timeline updates, and access restriction explanations, follows predictable structures that Claude handles efficiently.

The limitation specific to archives: Claude doesn't know your collection. It can't tell you what's in a box it hasn't seen. The intellectual content of finding aids, the knowledge of what's significant about a collection and why, comes from your processing work. Claude handles the prose layer after the intellectual work is done.

Best for: Finding aid prose drafting, accession record descriptions, research correspondence, and donor communications. Pricing: Free tier available; Claude Pro at $20/month.

2. Perplexity

Perplexity is useful for archivists in the specific context of researching biographical and organizational history information for finding aid notes.

Biographical history notes for personal papers collections, and administrative history notes for organizational records, require context that's often available in public sources: published biographical information, organizational histories, newspaper coverage of significant events, published scholarship that provides historical context for a collection. Tracking down that context manually takes time. Perplexity searches those public sources and returns cited results, accelerating the research step that precedes writing the history note.

For collections of historical figures or organizations, Perplexity can surface the publicly available biographical timeline, key dates and events, related collections at other institutions, and published sources that should inform the finding aid. That's a useful research starting point even when deeper archival or specialized research is also required.

Subject context research for scope notes is another application. When a collection relates to a specific historical event, social movement, or institutional context, Perplexity quickly surfaces the publicly available historiography and contextual information that helps you write an accurate scope note. You provide the specific knowledge of the collection; Perplexity helps with the broader historical context.

The constraint is the same as always with public search tools: Perplexity only knows what's publicly available. Specialized archival sources, unpublished scholarship, and institutional records require direct research. Use Perplexity for the public-source layer.

Best for: Biographical and organizational history research for finding aid notes, subject context research, and identifying related collections and published sources. Pricing: Free tier available; Perplexity Pro at $20/month.

3. Glean

Glean solves the institutional knowledge retrieval problem that archives and special collections departments often face acutely. When an institution has decades of processing decisions, access restriction documentation, donor correspondence, and prior finding aids distributed across multiple systems, finding what already exists is a significant operational challenge.

In a large archival repository, Glean makes the institution's own records about its collections searchable. A new staff member trying to understand the provenance of a complex collection can find prior processing notes, original donor correspondence, and related finding aids in seconds rather than hours. A reference archivist responding to a research inquiry can quickly locate what's already been written about a collection rather than reconstructing that knowledge from scratch.

For institutions that have digitized significant portions of their records and hold that documentation in enterprise systems, Glean's ability to search across those systems while respecting access permissions is practically valuable. Processing notes in one system, donor records in another, and finding aids in a third become searchable as a unified knowledge base.

The deployment reality: Glean is enterprise-only with custom pricing and requires IT involvement to implement. It's a serious option for major repositories and archives departments in large institutions, not a tool an individual archivist deploys independently. But for institutions where scattered institutional documentation is a real operational problem, it's worth evaluating.

Best for: Large archival repositories where institutional documentation about collections is scattered across multiple systems and retrieval is a daily friction point. Pricing: Enterprise only; custom pricing.

How to choose

The three tools address different parts of archival work.

For most archivists, starting with Claude Pro at $20/month addresses the highest-friction part of the workflow: the finding aid writing backlog. Add Perplexity for the research step that precedes history note writing. Consider Glean only if institutional-scale documentation retrieval is a genuine operational problem.

One note on AI and archival ethics: AI-assisted description should be disclosed in finding aids where your institution's practice calls for it. Some institutions are documenting AI involvement in descriptive workflows in their processing notes. Check your institution's developing policies on this and be transparent where appropriate.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI help with reparative description work?

Claude is useful for drafting language that addresses outdated or harmful terminology in legacy finding aids. Reparative description requires thoughtful human judgment about the appropriate approach for specific communities and materials. AI can help with the prose once the intellectual decisions are made, including drafting explanatory notes, preferred terminology, and community-informed language. The substantive decisions stay with the archivist and relevant communities.

What about born-digital records?

AI tools help with the description layer of born-digital processing, the same way they help with physical collections. They don't help with the technical side: format identification, file system analysis, or digital preservation actions. For the writing step after technical processing, Claude applies equally.

Can AI help with oral history transcription or description?

Claude can help draft descriptions of oral history recordings based on notes or summaries. It can also help structure transcripts and produce summary descriptions of interview content. It shouldn't be used to transcribe audio directly; use specialized transcription tools for that step, then Claude for the description and summary.