Optimisation of archival processes involving digitisation of typewritten documents

Purpose – The authors investigate optical character recognition (OCR) technology and discuss its implementation in the context of digitisation of archival materials. Design/methodology/approach – The typewritten transcripts of the Croatian Writers’ Society from the mid-sixties of the 20th Century are used as the test data. The optimal digitisation setup is investigated in order to obtain the best optical character recognition results. This was done by using the sample of 123 pages digitised at different resolution settings and binarisation levels. Findings – A series of tests showed that different settings produce significantly different results. The best OCR accuracy achieved at the test sample of the typewritten documents was 95.02%. The results show that the resolution is significantly more important than binarisation pre-processing procedure for achieving better OCR results. Originality/value – Based on the research results, the authors give recommendations for achieving optimal digitisation process setup with the aim of increasing the quality of OCR results. Finally, the authors put the research results in the context of digitisation of cultural heritage in general and discuss further investigation possibilities