Case study · Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · 2024–present
The Reading Room: Exploring Theodore Roosevelt’s Life Through AI
A GPT-powered way into the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s collection — designed so anyone with a question about TR can ask in plain language and walk back out with sourced, citable answers.
The brief
Cultural institutions sit on enormous, under-indexed collections: letters, speeches, photographs, ephemera. Finding the right object has historically required knowing the finding aid — an archivist’s skill, not a visitor’s. The job: lower that bar from “know the finding aid” to “ask a question.”
The Reading Room
The Reading Room is the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s public interface to its collection. A visitor — a student, a teacher, a researcher, a curious citizen — can:
- Pick from prompts: I want to do research, find images, build a lesson plan, write a paper, test my knowledge…
- Or type their own question.
- Or pick a topic: the Square Deal, Rough Riders, Roosevelt’s presidency, antitrust actions, the Bull Moose party, books TR authored.
The AI does the retrieval, summarization, and synthesis — but always points back to the underlying primary source. No hallucinated quotes, no fabricated dates, no paraphrase masquerading as TR’s voice.
How it works
Designed around scholarly trust
The hard part of LLMs in cultural-heritage settings isn’t getting an answer — it’s getting an answer the institution is willing to stand behind. The Reading Room is built so that:
- Every answer cites and links to the primary sources it drew from.
- The model retrieves from the Library’s digitized collection rather than from open-web speculation.
- An “How we use AI” explainer and a “Report an issue” pathway are first-class UI, not afterthoughts.
Built with curators, not around them
The project is a partnership with the collections and curatorial team from day one. The AI is a wayfinding layer over their work, not a replacement for it — and the team has authority over what the tool will and won’t answer.
Why it matters
The bar for “research at a presidential library” should be a question, not a finding aid.
The Library opens with this capability live on day one. It’s a working model for what conversational AI looks like when an institution is serious about both accessibility and scholarly integrity — not one at the expense of the other.