Use Case: Archive Digitisation

State Chancellery Canton St.Gallen: Processing the Past For the Future Using Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Overview

A total of 2'450 documents with creation dates back to 1941. In the spirit of the progressive digitisation of the Canton of St.Gallen, the Retrodigital Platform project was launched. In the future, it should be possible to access the various historical publications of the State Chancellery independent of time and place, as well as to simplify any necessary research.

Task

Digitisation of historical documents and the creation of a web application for sifting and structured searches.

Scope

Over 120'000 pages

Services

OCR (Optical Character Recognition), text & structural analysis, and the creation of an editor.

„For my work as a lawyer, it is particularly useful that I can now access the referendum drafts published in the Official Gazette, as well as messages and drafts of decrees, from anywhere and at any time, back to 1970, and drafts of enactments published in the Official Journal. With the efficient search function, everything can be found quickly, which usually saves the time-consuming trip to the archives.”

Marlène Schürch, Lawyer with the State Chancellery of the Canton of St.Gallen

Starting Point

To comprehend the origin of a legal text or a government decision, it is necessary to view the corresponding official gazette. However, until the realization of Retrodigital, it was only possible to view this information physically in the state archives or in the archives of the state chancellery, which was then retrieved by the previously searched official gazette number. This was, until recently, a time-consuming task due to the limited opening hours and prolonged time required for manual search, which on some days occupied several employees. Furthermore, with the introduction of the home office obligation, this increased the required effort even further. Even for historians who need the documents for family research, the physical inspection was inconvenient and sometimes involved long journeys.

In the spirit of the progressive digitization of the Canton of St.Gallen, the Retrodigital Platform project was launched. In the future, it should be possible to access the various historical publications of the State Chancellery independent of time and place, which will simplify any necessary research.

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Our Approach

As a leader in Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Acodis was commissioned to create the platform.

The total count of documents was 2,450, and their year of creation dated back to 1941.

Acodis created a scalable platform equipped with full-text search & filter functionality. The platforms also includes the ability to be supplemented with other document types resulting in faster and more precise search queries saving the legal staff countless hours.

Finally, Acodis created an editor which allows the State Chancellery to enter and maintain metadata in order to make it accessible later in a cleaned PDF.

Customer Benefits

Big Step in the Direction of E-Government

More Efficient & Location-Independent Research

Immortalisation of Past Law Sheets

Outcome

By creating the Retrodigital platform, the State Chancellery is able to make historical publications accessible to the public, simplify and accelerate research, and successfully pursue the digitisation of the Canton of St.Gallen in cooperation with the State Archives. With Acodis' years of experience, this project was implemented quickly and successfully and the State Chancellery now has one of the most modern research tools for legal publications.

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