Dr. Christian Groh, Head of Archives
“The ITS is very advanced in its indexing, since names from many individual documents were recorded in the context of its tracing activities. It is highly unusual for an archive to offer descriptions on the level of individual sheets. We have an indexing team that is currently prioritizing the description of the around three million correspondence files relating to victims of Nazi persecution.
The expanded archival description of individual sheets would offer tremendous benefits to the users of the ITS archive, both locally and online. This is why we began looking into additional automated indexing in 2016. We send test data to various providers who describe the documents by place name, by the names of concentration camps, or by document type. Then we evaluate and compare the results. What can the different systems do? How precisely and quickly can we index collections by using them? And how high are the costs? Afterwards we’ll decide how to use automated text recognition processes as an additional type of archival description.”
