Using AI and crowdsourcing in digitisation and processing of archival materials

Digitisation of archival materials is a lengthy process in which the act of digitisation is usually the shortest and the most straightforward one. It is the processing of the digitised materials that take a lot of time and effort. It is valuable to have digitised materials available online, even for the reason of not having to travel to the physical location of the originals, but the tendency of extracting additional value from the materials increases. To that end, the archival materials can be processed by new techniques such as artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing. The authors use the example of digitisation of the minutes from the Faculty (of Humanities and Social Sciences) Council meetings dating from 1913 to 1996 and the application of AI to improve the OCR results and NER for semantic enrichment as well the example of digitisation of the food rationing cards, used between 1941 and 1945 in Zagreb, Croatia and the application of AI and crowdsourcing to data extraction, analysis and visualisation.