EPISODE 3: Michelle Gollehon, Utah Historical Society

AI Meets the Archive: How Utah Historical Society Is Using Google Gemini to Unlock 118,000 Card Catalog Records

What happens when a digitization project is too big for any human team to tackle and AI becomes the only practical path forward?

In this episode of Wider Lens, we sit down with Michelle Gollehon, Digital Asset Specialist at the Utah Historical Society, for a fascinating conversation about one of the most ambitious and innovative AI-assisted digitization projects in the field right now.

With the Utah Historical Society preparing to move its collections into the new Museum of Utah, Michelle and her team faced a pressing challenge: an entire legacy card catalog — 118,000 physical index cards — that needed to be digitized and made searchable before the move. Captured on DT's Versa imaging system and transcribed using Google Gemini Pro, the project offers a real-world blueprint for how AI can unlock research resources that would otherwise remain inaccessible indefinitely. By Gemini's own estimate, the approach saved approximately 4.5 years of manual labor and $176,000 in staffing costs.

In this episode, we unpack:

• How a collection move to the Museum of Utah sparked an unexpected AI pilot project
• Why AI transcription is fundamentally different from traditional OCR
• The prompt engineering journey: from early hallucinations to asking Gemini to write its own prompt
• The practical limits of working in batches and other hidden bottlenecks in AI-assisted digitization workflows
• The tribal flags project: digitizing the flags of Utah's eight Indigenous tribes for museum display using a Mylar sandwich technique on a wide-format scanner
• And much more…

Whether you're managing a card catalog of your own or just beginning to explore AI's role in your digitization program, this episode offers concrete lessons from someone who figured it out by doing it.

🎧 Listen now for one of the most practical, on-the-ground accounts of AI-assisted digitization you'll find anywhere in the cultural heritage field.

And as always, we welcome feedback, comments, and questions. Let us know what you'd like to hear on this podcast, or if you'd like to be a guest. Email us at: widerlens@digitaltransitions.com

Additional Notes from this episode:

• Utah Historical Society: https://history.utah.gov/
• Museum of Utah (opening soon): https://www.museumsofutah.org/
• Google Gemini Pro: https://gemini.google.com/
• Gaussian Splatting (mentioned as an emerging 3D capture method): https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/
• ilovepdf.com (free PDF compression tool mentioned in the episode): https://www.ilovepdf.com/
• DT Versa Imaging System: https://heritage-digitaltransitions.com/product-catalog/
• DT's Online Digitization Certification Courses: https://heritage-digitaltransitions.com/dt-digitization-certification-program/
• DT's "Digitization Program Planning Guide" Bundle: https://heritage-digitaltransitions.com/product/cultural-heritage-digitization-planning-bundle-solutions-guide-digitization-program-planning-guide-pdf/