Arkistolaitos

Quality of scanned documents vary, that is a fact. Another fact is that without high quality optical character recognition (OCR) it is difficult or impossible to achieve good usability or findability. This paper focuses on improving the OCR quality by performing different pre-OCR image manipulations and testing the performance of different OCR engines. The results clearly indicate that there are differences between the performance of the OCR engines, but the pre-OCR image manipulations did not significantly affect the results. Tests were conducted with mostly restricted content which came from the National Archives of Finland. The figures shown in this paper are based on tests where material from the Central Archives of Finnish Business Records was used.

A software package and PoC to help usability in various cases like quality issues and metadata collecting after digitization is introduced. Here usability means the improvement of the process using AI based automation as much as possible and providing easy-to-use interfaces for the end user. This is done with the help of existing open source tools. Below we present some preliminary results of the ongoing DALAI project 1 .

It was the first time that a session specifically for national archivists had been held at CITRA; the innovation was well received and the discussion lively. Two plenary sessions tackled The Paradigm Shift for Archives in the Information Society: From Keeper to Information Manager and Return on Investment versus Global Solidarity: Contradictory or Complementary? The first session addressed the issue of changing roles and responsibilities of archives services (as applicable to nations in a state of transition to democracy as those with long-standing democratic governments), the importance of exchanging ideas, and of constantly benchmarking best practice. The second session outlined the need for global professional solidarity and emphasised the benefits of, and need for, investment in international co-operative ventures.