How to manage collections and documents in Transkribus Lite

This guide will give you an overview of how to manage your collections and documents in Transkribus Lite. For this, it is important to understand how collections and documents are structured in Transkribus. In the image below you can see the logical structure of Transkribus: Your Documents are organized in so called collections. These collections can be understood as a folder containing documents. Collections are typically used on project basis. For instance, all documents belonging to one project are organized in one collection. One collection can have multiple documents. And documents on the other hand consist of one or more document-pages.

Collection Overview

Once you have logged into your account, you will see the collection overview. On this page you will be able to view and manage the complete list of collections that you have access to. If you are new to Transkribus this list will only contain one collection i.e. your personal collection with some sample documents in it. At the top of the page there is the options bar. When you click on the options bar, you will be able to select or deselect the different options that you would like to have displayed as columns in the collection list. You can view the collection ID, the name of the collection, your role, the collection description as well as the number of documents in the collection. 

Creating Collections 

With the “Create” button that you will find above the collection list, you can create new collections. All you have to do is to define a name for the new collection. Once you have created the collection, you just need to refresh the page with the “Reload” button and you will see your new collection in the collection list. 

Single Collection View

When you click on a collection in the collection overview list, the single collection view will open. This is the place where you can organize and manage your collection. On the top of the page there are 4 different tabs: The document table, the search tab, the upload documents tab and the recognition tab. In this section we will talk about the document table tab, the other three tabs will be explained in the next sections. 

Document table 

The document table will show you a complete list of all the documents that are in the collection. You can see the document ID, the title of the document, the number of pages, the uploader of the document and if defined the language of the document. Again, on top of the list you have the options bar that allows you to show and hide different columns of the list. 

Collection Manager

In the document table tab there is also the button for the collection manager. The collection manager allows you to organize every aspect of the collection. When you click on the collection manager button the collection manager will open. Also the collection manager has four different tabs. 

User tab

The first tab is the “User” tab. Here you can manage all the users of a collection. On the one hand, you can remove existing users or change their roles by clicking on them in the list and then selecting the action you want to take. And on the other hand, you can add new users by clicking on “Add” and adding them via their Transkribus-Account email-address. Note: Keep in mind that the users you want to add need to have registered a Transkribus account before you add them.

Documents tab

In the “Documents” tab you can delete your existing documents or link them to other collections. After clicking on the document you want to edit, you can simply click on “delete document” (a prompt will ask you if you are sure) or link the document to another collection by clicking on “Link document to collection” and then selecting the collection you want the document to link to. 

Tags tab

Under the “Tags” tab all of your tags can be seen, edited and new ones added. By default you will find a number of tags in your collection. You can edit the name, add or remove attributes and choose a color for every tag (default ones or ones that you have created). And you can also remove tags. With the “Add new tag” button you can add new tags. Don’t forget to save you tag configuration once you have finished the setup. All attributes of default tags cannot be deleted. If a default tag was deleted it can be easily added by selecting the predefined value in Add new tag.

Characters tab

Finally, in the characters tab you can add and remove unicode characters that you want to use in your collection. You can add single characters in the “Add characters” line by just adding them in the line and hitting “Enter”. But you can also add whole unicode ranges with the “Search unicode ranges” option.  

Single Document View

By clicking on a document in the document table you can open the document. You will then see an overview of all the pages in the selected document. In the example below there is just one page in the document but of course you can have as many pages in the document as you want. In the pages overview you can see all pages including a thumbnail, the page number and the status of the page. Below you have two action buttons: View page and download. 

View Page

By clicking on “View” in the page overview you open the page viewer. By default you will see the uploaded document page on the left side. For a newly created document the right side will be empty. This is where the transcribed text will be displayed as soon as the document has been transcribed manually or with Handwritten Text Recognition. 

On the top right corner you will see the following action buttons:

Tags: Here you can hide, show and configure your tags

Show image and text

Show text only

Show image only

Edit page

[Version status | username] Version Selection

When the transcription of a page is done, the text will be shown on the right side of the page view. By hovering or clicking on one line of text, no matter if on the right or left side, the corresponding text will be highlighted on the other side.  You can switch between different versions of a transcript by clicking the button in the center displaying the currently loaded version status and the user that saved the version.

Download page

On the page over view as well as on every single page view, you will have a button to download the page. You can either download the image of the page in different sizes (S, M, L or XL) or the transcribed text of the page in XML or TXT format.