Making a Modern Archive


For the past three years, the National Archives of Finland has been part of the revolutionary Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ) project. Because of this, the archive has made a deep dive not only into technology behind Handwritten Text Recognition but in the vast field of Digital Humanities. This spring the National Archives is starting its own project called Making a Modern Archive (MaMA), where the purpose is to integrate Handwritten Text Recognition as a permanent service of the archive. This means that in the future the National Archives wants to provide an increasing amount of records in fully computer readable form and thus enable a better access to its collections and new research possibilities. During the MaMA project, a collection of 800,000 pages of 19th century Court Records will be processed with HTR and provided through a new user interface for research. The project will be implemented in cooperation with READ –COOP which is responsible for the technical services.

The goal of the project is to build steady workflows and tasks which will form the HTR process from the archival point of view. Starting from selecting the records, producing Ground Truth and finally providing the processed collections through digital services. In addition to all this, we try to participate to an important discussion of future archives and what it means from different perspectives.

Welcome aboard!

Maria Kallio

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