The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Library and Archives Canada (LAC) have partnered on a pilot project to improve access to LAC’s materials in the Héritage collection through Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).
The pilot project will process a subset of the RG 10 collection, “Records relating to Indian Affairs,” with Transkribus ICR software developed by READ-COOP. This project is intended to improve access to a highly used set of records and begin the process towards making the Héritage collection full-text searchable.
The choice of the RG 10 sub-collections reflects both organizations’ commitment to making Indigenous records more accessible, as well as the high usage rate of the material, particularly among claims researchers working for Indigenous communities.
The Héritage project, which is part of Canadiana, is a 10-year initiative to digitize and make accessible online some of Canada’s most popular archival collections encompassing roughly 40 million pages of primary-source documents. The records chronicle the country and its people from the 1600s to the mid-1900s.
