Handwritten Transcription

Our specialist technicians meticulously transcribe your content using scans of your JPEG and TIFF image collections (often produced via digitisation).

The transcribed text can then be added as metadata to a digital archive and associated with the image it was scanned from, to allow keyword searching of the text content, either via collections management software or on a digital archive website.

For example, if you digitised a collection of handwritten registers, then transcribed to extract the text, this would then allow searching by keyword against the articles’ content.

To see examples of this in action take a look at our PastView digital collections management system.

We can capture handwritten content of any digitised items – from formatted items such as registers, cadet books or index’s to letters, diaries and books.

We can redact any sensitive data, ensuring that any transcribed data complies with data-protection and 2018 GDPR legislation.

Our team can also index your digitised files by incorporating metadata created from the transcription within the filenames of the digital images.

Once data has been transcribed we use bespoke validation software, which cross-checks your transcribed data against thousands of other records that TWA have transcribed in the past, to highlight and correct any potential errors (even errors in forenames, surnames, and location names).

This unique software, together with our human spot checking process, allows us to offer an average accuracy of 95%.

We can produce output files in any format you specify, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, Text or CSV.

We can help you import the data into your own system, alternatively we can import the data into our collection management systems, PastView. Take a look at our internet based BookViewing Software, which allows you to link the transcribed data to your digitised images.

If you are interested in publishing your digital collection and transcription data online, find a PastView package here to suit your organisation.

Whilst our OCR service can be very accurate when converting printed type text into digital format, in our experience the accuracy of OCR on handwritten text is very poor. For this reason, in the case of capturing hand written text we recommend using our transcription service.