Making the Grand Marais Public Library Ledger searchable

In December 2015 we noted that the Grand Marais Public Library was a new contributor to Minnesota Reflections. As part of the MDL/DPLA Public Library Partnerships Project they asked us to digitize a handwritten ledger containing the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees of the Grand Marais Public Library from 1904 until 1967. The ledger helps document the development of the library as well as the activities of many prominent community members and will form the foundation for additional digitization projects related to Grand Marais and its library.

But simply scanning the ledger and putting it into Minnesota Reflections isn’t enough. The digitized images of each page of the ledger are just that – images – pictures of the handwritten pages, which are not keyword searchable. Finding a specific name or date or topic in the 297 pages of the ledger would be a tedious task without the ability to search! Even more fundamental is the issue that not everyone knows how to read cursive writing anymore.

To make searches possible, MDL uses a variety of tools.  We run many text-based items through a process called Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, in which software “reads” the text in the image and translates it into searchable electronic letters and words that are stored in the page-level metadata for the digital image. Next time you search a text-based item in Reflections, look at a particular page and then scroll down to the bottom of the metadata – you’ll see the text as it appears in its searchable format.

The Grand Marais library ledger was not, however, a candidate for OCR because it was hand-written.  For hand-written items added to Reflections we hire transcriptionists who read each page and type the text so that we can load it into the page-level metadata. Audio materials, such as oral histories or this video about the Washington County Parks, also require transcription to make their content searchable.