Digitized 18th century prints from the ETH Library searchable in full text
ETH Library has now provided 1,600 of its digitized prints on e-rara from 1771 through 1800 in full-text form.
Around 13,000 of the 20,400 digitized prints of the ETH Library can now be searched in full-text form and downloaded as PDF files with graphics and full text, as text files or as JPEG images.
To overcome the difficulties of generating full texts of old prints, we first employed a statistical procedure to ascertain which prints were especially suited for full-text recognition and which should be excluded. The result is a character recognition accuracy of over 98 percent for this 18th century content.
To find these prints newly enriched with full text, you need only apply the filters “Full text searchable”, Period: “1701–1800” and Institution: “ETH Library” at the external page e-rara website. You can search through full texts on e-rara either in a general search or separately for each title. For example, you can search for the keyword “Gewitterwolken” (thunderclouds) in external page Beyträge zur theoretischen und praktischen Elektrizitätslehre (Essays on Theoretical and Practical Electricity, 1793).
The initial results with full-text recognition of 18th century prints will help us decide on the feasibility of continuing with OCR (optical character recognition) for other sections of our holdings.
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