Cultural stewardship, not just technology.
Building the curation workbench that helps cultural heritage institutions surface what their collections already hold.
The quiet crisis of the undescribed
Cultural heritage institutions across the world hold billions of digitized materials that have never been formally described. Materials that document the lived experience of communities. Materials that sit in storage without the metadata needed to make them findable.
The resources required to describe archival materials at the item level have never scaled with the volume of acquisitions. The backlogs are generational, and they grow faster than any institution can close them.
Undescribed collections are invisible to search engines. Invisible to discovery aggregators. Invisible to every digital system built on top of what has been described.
“Materials vanish twice. First into backlog darkness. Then from the digital systems training the world to forget they ever existed.”
Legally structured for the mission
Acervo Intelligence Corp. is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, a legal structure that holds the company accountable to its stated public benefit. A legal obligation embedded in our corporate charter.
“...to expand access to and engagement with cultural heritage materials to promote their preservation, discovery, and educational use for the advancement of research and sustainable cultural institutions.”
Pablo Casals conducting Olga Iglesias in his art songs for soprano, Marlboro Music Festival, Vermont, 1965
Olga Iglesias archive, ca. 1941–2007.
Born from a single archive.
Anthony Cheney
Founder. Grandson and steward of the Olga Iglesias archive.
Acervo was born from over a decade spent digitizing and preserving a single archive: letters, scores, programs, photographs, and more, documenting mid-twentieth century Puerto Rican classical music, the Casals Festival, and the cultural networks that sustained them.
Olga Iglesias was Pablo Casals' chosen soprano. Her archive traces the artistic and institutional life of that world.
Processing that collection demanded human judgment no software tool could replicate. The tools themselves had to change. Built to carry the weight of professional judgment to the scale the crisis demands.
Built on archival work supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities, through the Olga Iglesias Project.
Collection materials contributed to the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the cooperative digital library serving Caribbean and circum-Caribbean communities.
The humanist is the authority.
Not the software.
We call the practice evidence-first curation. The AI drafts every claim; professionals judge each one with the evidence in hand.
Nothing is published or delivered without a human choosing it. Every claim carries its receipts, every decision is reversible, and every workflow ends at the cataloger's desk. Acervo hosts no masters, publishes nothing on its own authority, and locks no one in.
Let's make your digitized collections discoverable.
We work directly with archives, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations to make undescribed collections findable.
30-minute personalized walkthrough · Bring your own documents to test