New Delhi, Oct. 3 -- As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary of independence, Smithsonian leaders are turning to AI to better understand items in its collection tied to the fight that led to the country's founding.

The goal is to allow the public and scholars to both search the institution's collection and draw connections across the Smithsonian and other organizations, such as the Library of Congress, to gain a deeper sense of how communities formed and functioned at the nation's birth.

Since researchers on the project, known as Revolution Crossroads, began applying AI models in the spring, they have quickly drawn links that would have previously required extensive manual searches across multiple catalogs. They located, f...