First of two parts
IN the Philippines, many teachers, academics and cultural workers are wary of artificial intelligence (AI), and perhaps they should be. It is so powerful it can distort records of the past and present especially with the advent of deepfakes. Also, some even fear that it encourages intellectual dishonesty among students that may be harder to detect in the long run. And what if cultural workers can now be replaced by bots in doing their job? That is why many are afraid to talk about this, but AI seems inevitable.
It was a privilege to be invited by FamilySearch Philippines to be one of the VIP delegates consisting of government officials and personalities who can influence policymaking and public opinion on records management to attend “RootsTech 2026,” the international conference on genealogy and technology from March 5 to 7 at the Salt Palace at Salt Lake City, Utah, and a special event a day before that called the “Archivist and Record Custodians (ARC) Symposium.” FamilySearch is an international genealogy organization and website sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
The theme of RootsTech this year was “Together,” which emphasizes linking generations, collaborating on family history and fostering inclusion among participants worldwide using the latest technology. It is wonderful how the LDS belief in “proxy baptism,” or “baptism for the dead,” which was heavily criticized by some as fringe Christian doctrine, resulted in collaboration to save historical and genealogical records, not just from among LDS members, but from across religions and nationalities. Throughout the event, a video message of Father Gaspar Segaya, OP, the archivist of the University of Santo Tomas, the oldest archive in the country, was shown repeatedly, saying he now teaches “The Gospel of the Archives.” That in saving records that tell the story of the Filipino people, their faith and identity, we “bring the wisdom of the past in the heart of today’s world.” Despite the difficulty of finding records, FamilySearch had digitized most of the existing parish records around the country and makes them available when they are destroyed by calamities. They would have been lost if not for their efforts.
One of the talks in the ARC symposium pertain to saving records in situations like wars and oppressions as demonstrated by Lars Fivalstad Smaaberg in “Archivists without Borders/Arxivers sense Fronteres: Engaging when documentary heritage and archives are at risk” on the work they have done in the preservation of the archives of the Sahrawi people, the processing of international adoption files in Côte d’Ivoire and support for associations of families of victims of enforced disappearances in Mexico. And there was also a talk by James Cannon and Michael Gray on “Saving Your Tribal and Village Heritage: FamilySearch Oral Genealogy Initiative,” where they talked about how a FamilySearch initiative was able to document 2.7 million oral genealogy interviews from Indigenous peoples of 24 countries that might have been lost, doing 15,000 interviews every week! Again, these oral genealogies may have been lost to us, too.
The whole conference talked about technological advancements in DNA research and other innovative tools for discovering and preserving family stories. But the subtheme of the conference, the buzzword really, was artificial intelligence.
Dr. Jonathan Claymore McCollum, in a presentation, “Giving Voice to Silent Scripts: Indexing Records in Dead Languages,” demonstrated how preserving and indexing Ladino, Ottoman and Aramaic records yielded priceless historical, cultural and genealogical data through the help of indexing for searchability and HTR (handwritten text recognition). He then led a panel of experts in Ottoman-Turkish history — Dr. Kent Schull, Dr. Sibel Karakoc, Ahlem Ellafi (project manager for Tunisia of Infoscribe AI), Dr. Stephen Randall Filios and Dr. Richard Wittmann — on how technology, especially HTR, is helping historians do their work. Dr. Wittman talked about his experience penetrating the famous monastery at Mt. Athos and digitizing their records, which for me was thrilling to hear. Dr. Filios gave us some tips on how to use AI effectively: Give them boundaries and remove irrelevant information. Dr. McCollum also reminded us that these AI technologies are really artforms because the word technology itself came from the Greek “technē,” meaning art.
Despite being a special event for archivists and records custodians, the ARC symposium can be experienced by those who were not with us in Utah, because the RootsTech yearly conference can be accessed online, on demand. Aside from the presentations, there are panel discussions which one can watch on “Digital Transformation Opportunities and Challenges,” and “Preserving the Past with Emerging Tech: AI’s Role in Archival Stewardship.”
In the ARC symposium, I am realizing the Earth-shattering implications of AI in the preservation of historical records, the very backbone of the historical discipline. AI can never replace historians and cultural workers, but if we learn it, it might make us stronger. More on this and RootsTech next week.
To be concluded on March 31, 2026
