Digitizing a county historical archive, page by page
A county records office turned a century of handwritten archives into searchable, structured text.
The challenge
A county records office held more than a century of deeds, ledgers, and correspondence — much of it handwritten, faded, and never digitized. Researchers and residents had to visit in person and page through fragile originals.
The approach
Docen OCR handled the historical handwriting and faint scans; parsing recovered structure from ledgers and forms; and managed batch processed the archive without the office standing up any infrastructure of its own.
- Parsing and layout to recover clean structure.
- Schema-driven extraction for the fields that mattered.
- Evaluation against a labeled sample before rollout.
The outcome
The collection became searchable online, opening a century of public records to anyone with a browser.
These documents were effectively invisible unless you came in person. Now they're searchable from anywhere.— Records Manager, county records office
Want to see it on your own documents? Open the playground or reach out — we're happy to run a sample with you.