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Today, we are launching a  dedicated to the science of Benjamin Franklin. NotebookLM is an AI research tool that empowers users and researchers to interact with and leverage knowledge from sources, including digitised cultural collections. You can read more about the collaboration with Google Arts & Culture on co-authored by Sir Mark Walport FRS, Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society and Amit Sood, Director of Google Arts & Culture.

The launch is also a chance for me to reflect on nearly 10 years of collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and how AI is changing the way we explore our collections.

At its core Google Arts & Culture is for more than 15 years to open up cultural heritage in partnership with  institutions from around the world. The first stories we launched on the platform accompanied our series of 'People of Science' in 2017.

These were also some of the first projects in my current role. Since then, we have curated 47 stories, some in collaborations with academics such as , others to showcase some of the in our collections.

Ten years on, I can clearly see two incredibly valuable aspects of our collaboration with Google through the Arts & Culture platform.

The first is that it gives us an opportunity to reach a public that normally does not get through our doors, and share with them some of the most inspiring stories from our collections. The viewing figures from the platform show that the demographic we are reaching is predominantly phone users between 18 and 25 and spread around the globe. The youngsters in this age range who visit our reading room are usually part of degree and masters courses from UK and US institutions whose lecturers are interested in the history of science.

So long as you have an internet connection, you can access the 1,000+ items we have digitised on our Royal Society Google Arts & Culture. Although we have developed our own digital platform Science in the Making with more than , the people who use it are predominantly researchers already interested in our collections. Of course, a digital story or a digitised artefact will never replace seeing the real thing, but it may serve as an invitation to explore in more depth, or pay a visit to the Royal Society,  and so we always aim to inspire  people from as diverse a pool as possible. Google Arts & Culture has been a great way to do this.

The second most beneficial aspect of our collaboration with Google Arts & Culture happens behind the scenes - perhaps mainly for my benefit. For the last 10 years, the team at Google Arts & Culture London have regularly reached out to share the latest technology they have developed, from their , which I hope we can use to explore some of our art collection, to today’s NotebookLM.

While we are currently exploring AI-assisted transcription through the platform , and investigating how we can automate some of our processes in collaboration with , NotebookLM provides a very different type of tool. Google NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that lets you upload your own documents and ask questions, get summaries, and uncover insights from your personal collection of sources. I was lucky to chat to its founder, author , before we started curating the Featured Benjamin Franklin NotebookLM. He introduced the tool as a way to manage research resources, combining machine-readable primary and secondary sources in a controlled version of Google’s . Clearly inspired by Johnson’s own research methods as an author, the NotebookLM provides a new way to explore sources and manage citations efficiently.

It reminds me of  (above), a Renaissance compendium which collated sources on the main topics on the university syllabus and could be interrogated from various entry points, adding an illustrative layer to the notions it treated. That is, if could be recomposed by anyone at will, with any standardised sources, at the push of a few buttons, rather than resulting from hours of labour by one of the most inventive publishers of its time. As with Margarita, the sources are limited to what you put in, but we’ve all been impressed by the output generated by the NotebookLM, from the video explainer to the science quiz. Putting the Franklin notebook together was painless: I selected archives which were transcribed or published, they were added to the Notebook, we created some curated explainers around it, et voila!

As the Digital Resources Manager of a collection that places scientific experimentation at its core, I try to learn about the latest digital tools and possibilities every day. So, I am excited to investigate the ever-evolving capabilities of AI. As always, AI-generated results need to be double-checked and of course it is crucial for users to remember that this Featured NotebookLM only includes items from our collections rather than the Benjamin Franklin papers, which can be seen on the .

It is important to acknowledge here that there have been various . I am not sure that I would ever suggest to the rest of our small team that we turn to AI to take over our curatorial duties, especially seeing how resource-intensive it can be. Instead, I think that AI’s most promising offer is in its capacity to extend our existing capabilities to manage, arrange and leverage knowledge, rather than shortcut the creative process and our responsibility to select materials and interrogate their silences.

Please note: users may need to have a Gmail account/ log into Gmail on a browser to view the Notebook