Databases
Archives Text Discovery Platform
NOTE: This is a prototype. There may be bugs, the interface may change, and the server may occasionally go down for a few minutes at a time. We appreciate your patience.
The Archives Text Discovery Platform allows users to perform full-text searches of our digitized Archives collections, including typed, printed and, most notably, handwritten documents. Taking advantage of recently developed natural language processing tools and advances in artificial intelligence, we have transcribed page images for nearly all the digital items currently catalogued in our Archives Collections database and made that text discoverable through a simple search interface.
Searching this data will produce a list of results that contains the keywords or phrases provided. Each result will link to a detail page that includes the digital object's PDF, initially set to the page on which the search terms were found, along with various pieces of metadata about the object and the collection to which it belongs. Links on that page will take users to the corresponding levels of description in our Archives Collections database. The page transcript itself, with search terms highlighted, appears below the PDF frame and can help users locate their keywords in the PDF's page image.
The current platform is only a prototype. There may be bugs, the interface may change, and we will likely add more features soon. The server may occasionally go down for a few minutes at a time. We appreciate your patience but felt the critical need for the information access outweighed the need for a perfect interface.
We would love feedback as you explore. If you find something particularly interesting with this tool, please let us know about it. You may uncover things that nobody at the Institute even knows about yet! If this leads you to something that becomes an integral part of your research in a project, we would be delighted to hear about it. We would also like to hear if anything is not working as expected. Please use the Contact Us form and mention "Text Discovery Platform" or "ArchSearch" in your message.
