+ Birth of the First Republic: Recognising Austrian Parliamentary papers

After the tumult of World War One, the First Austrian Republic was declared in September 1919. Nearly 100 years later, the Austrian Parliamentary Directorate are making documents from this crucial period of national history available online.

They have recently digitised 9000 parliamentary papers from the First Republic and are working with our Transkribus platform to provide the fully-searchable text of this collection.

These parliamentary documents contain both handwritten and printed text (using the Fraktur font of Latin calligraphy).

5000 pages of the collection have now been processed in Transkribus with a mixture of Handwritten Text Recognition and our ABBYY FineReader OCR engine. 3,500 of these pages were then manually checked to ensure the accuracy of the recognised words.  Keywords have been captured and assigned to documents, allowing for further search options.  The next task is to record the titles and metadata of the documents to enhance their usefulness.

• Consult the documents on the Austrian Parliament website