Optimisation of archival processes involving digitisation of typewritten documents

Scientific paper - Original scientific paper

• Author: Hrvoje Stančić
• Author: Željko Trbušić
• Author's institution: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of information and Communication sciences)
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: SOCIAL SCIENCES; Information and Communication Sciences; Archives and Documentation Studies

Abstract (english)

Purpose – The authors investigate optical character recognition (OCR) technology and discuss its implementation in the context of digitisation of archival materials.
Design/methodology/approach – The typewritten transcripts of the Croatian Writers’ Society from the mid-sixties of the 20th Century are used as the test data. The optimal digitisation setup is investigated in order to obtain the best optical character recognition results. This was done by using the sample of 123 pages digitised at different resolution settings and binarisation levels.
Findings – A series of tests showed that different settings produce significantly different results. The best OCR accuracy achieved at the test sample of the typewritten documents was 95.02%. The results show that the resolution is significantly more important than binarisation pre-processing procedure for achieving better OCR results.
Originality/value – Based on the research results, the authors give recommendations for achieving optimal digitisation process setup with the aim of increasing the quality of OCR results. Finally, the authors put the research results in the context of digitisation of cultural heritage in general and discuss further investigation possibilities.

• Keywords (english): digitisation; 0ptical character recognition; resolution; binarisation; typewritten documents; archival materials; cultural heritage
• Language: english
• Publication type: Scientific paper - Original scientific paper
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review: Peer review - international
• Publication version: Accepted version
• Journal title: Aslib Journal of Information Management
• Numbering: vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 545-559
• p-ISSN: 2050-3806
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2019-0326
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:186434
• Publication: 2020-07-16
• Document URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AJIM-11-2019-0326/full/html
• Type of resource: Text
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2021-02-16 12:09:10