Millions of people are engaged in genealogical research, and platforms such as Ancestry.com and MyHeritage are investing hundreds of millions of euros in the digitisation of historical sources. At the same time, archives around the world are facing two major challenges: enormous amounts of material and a digitisation process that is still largely manual, slow and expensive.
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RoboticScanning
Each individual document is checked by an ultrasonic sensor to ensure that no pages are skipped. If pages stick together or the robot loses a sheet, the production process is immediately interrupted. The next – and decisive – step is to enable complete remote control of the robots in order to facilitate genuine 24/7 production operations.
AI has already proven what is possible: historical registration forms are reliably transcribed and evaluated in a structured manner – names, dates, places and contexts become machine-readable.
Digitised archive holdings will become increasingly important for historical research in the coming years. Robots will play a decisive role in this.