One of the most powerful applications of Gemini for cultural heritage institutions that we are finding lies in its ability to transform cataloging of rare prints and books missing their title pages. Take for example the page below from a book we came across this week purporting to feature the Tobias Stimmer Biblical suite. The book is missing its title and other key pages, but was presented authoritatively as a reprint of the Tobias Stimmer suite. While the imagery certainly captures Stimmer's muscular nature, it doesn't seem to quite rise to his level. So, like the book cataloger of the future, we simply provided Gemini a cellphone photo of a single page.
Here's where things get interesting. The first thing Gemini noticed (which we had entirely missed) was the "CM" monogram at the bottom left of the woodcuts and confirmed that this is known monogram of Christoph Murer. Murer collaborated with Stimmer heavily, accounting for the similarity of style, while not quite achieving Stimmer's quality. Then, using the page photograph, Gemini searched digitized archives across the world until it located a digitized copy of the book and located this specific page, confirming the Murer attribution. It even went so far as to identify other woodcuts from the work and confirm that they are widely attributed to Murer by major institutions, adding additional support to the conclusion.
Once again, we continue to find Gemini to be the ultimate cataloging assistant, tracking down other digitized copies from a single page, identifying monograms and compiling supporting evidence for a human cataloger to review.
