Building archive digitization
The town was founded in the 14th century by Charles IV. According to legend, the emperor had it built soon after the accidental discovery of thermal springs by his hunting party. The spa enjoyed the favour of many noble families and wealthy townspeople as early as the 16th century. Due to several natural disasters, only a few buildings from this period have survived. Most of the architectural monuments date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the town experienced a “period of plenty”.
More info: www.karlovyvary.cz/en
Challenge
Develop a project for the digitization of the archive, which included documentation of different ages, quality, formats, weights and media. Approximately a quarter of it was from the period before World War II.
Solution
In 2012 and 2013 we participated in the project Ensuring data and information transfer in the territory of the Statutory City of Karlovy Vary. In order to minimize the risk of loss or damage of documents, we performed digitization directly at the customer’s premises. Scanning of the text part was performed on Kodak Alaris scanners with A3 flatbed and Kodak Capture Pro application, scanning of the drawing part on Contex large format scanners. For indexing we used our own application ScanIndex.
Benefits
By the end of 2013, we had processed the entire archive, which contained 4.4 million A4 pages. The archive is now accessible electronically to the wider public, facilitating the retrieval of documents for construction proceedings. The archive also provided important information for the inscription of the historical part of Karlovy Vary on the UNESCO list of monuments.
Used applications and hardware
- Kodak Capture Pro
- Kodak Alaris
- Contex