e-rara.ch is currently home to more than 78,000 digitized books. Since 1 February 2020, e-rara.ch has also used optical character recognition (OCR) for books from the eighteenth century.
The platform external page e-rara.ch makes a part of these digitized texts searchable as a full text and available for download as a text file. Full texts are generated for newly digitized books (initially only for texts published in 1771 and later) that you can now search through quickly and easily. The works can also be downloaded as text files and in PDF format with the respective full text referenced in the images of the book pages.
Full texts for publications written using Antiqua and Fraktur type are generated on e-rara.ch. There are currently around 14,500 digitized texts in more than 15 different languages in Antiqua and Fraktur type available and searchable as full texts. In order to guarantee the best results, a suitable OCR configuration is selected for each document. The benefits of doing so are shown in the example below with external page William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanos of the two Sicilies, Naples, 1776.
This process also ensures that the long s (“ſ”), whose use was increasingly widespread in Antiqua type in the eighteenth century, is generally correctly recognized.
external page e-rara.ch is the platform for digitized rare books from Swiss libraries.