In case you missed it, CRKN announced this today (1 Oct):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“CRKN is pleased to announce that the\u00a0Departmental Letterbooks<\/a>, part of Library and Archives Canada\u2019s (LAC) RG 10 fonds, have been fully transcribed through CRKN and LAC\u2019s intelligent character recognition (ICR) pilot project. This project,\u00a0launched in 2022<\/a>\u00a0to transcribe handwritten materials in the H\u00e9ritage collection with the artificial intelligence tool\u00a0Transkribus<\/a>, will make a portion of the RG 10 materials on H\u00e9ritage full-text searchable, and is the beginning of our long-term goal of harnessing emerging technologies to make the entire H\u00e9ritage collection more discoverable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Departmental Letterbooks, drawn from the RG 10 sub-collection \u201cRecords relating to Indian Affairs,\u201d contain information about the activities of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1871 to 1929 and are an important resource for Indigenous claims researchers and historians. Largely handwritten, the Letterbooks will now be significantly easier to navigate thanks to their transcription with Transkribus software, which will allow users to search within the full text of the Letterbooks and download searchable PDFs of documents.\u00a0Resources<\/a>\u00a0to aid in searching the Departmental Letterbooks and other RG 10 materials are available on the CRKN website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Departmental Letterbooks are the first batch of material selected by CRKN and LAC for the ICR pilot project, comprising approximately 600,000 pages of digitized images. Upcoming batches of material will include further selections from the sub-collection \u201cRecords relating to Indian Affairs,\u201d with the goal of supporting researchers studying topics related to First Nations, M\u00e9tis, and Inuit history in Canada. READ-COOP, the developer of Transkribus, is a non-commercial cooperative and data used in the project is not shared with third parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n