On the 11th of March 2009 an article was published in the Stentor, that highlighted the work Pictura has done for the Regionaal Archief Zutphen. On the 5th of March an article also appeared in De Toren. Pictura digitized all volumes of De Toren for Streekarchief Bommelerwaard. The photo shows our chauffeur picking up the newspapers.

De Toren
The March 5th issue of De Toren is a jubileum newspaper, because the weekly paper for the Bommelerwaard celebrates its 40th birthday this year. Streekarchief Bommelerwaard felt that this was a great opportunity to have all 40 volumes digitized by Pictura. The newspapers were picked up by our chauffeur in special flight cases that would protect them completely during transport. Afterwards we will digitize the newspapers, crop and straighten the images and use Optical Character Recognition to make the text accessible.

Streekarchief Bommelerwaard uses a Pictura Newspaper Viewer. It contains a database filled with both the digitized newspapers and the OCRed text from those newspapers. People can browse and search the newspapers in the viewer using the public interface. Especially the search function is powerful because it makes an enormous amount of data accessible with very little effort.

The issues of De Toren are still being digitized, but over 150 volumes of various other newspapers have already been made available online. You can view them using the
Digital Study Hall of Streekarchief Bommelerwaard.

The Stentor
The article in the Stentor refers to a job we did for the Regionaal Archief Zutphen. This time it were a number of old sources from Brummen from the 17th and 18th century. The sources provide information about tax money and all sorts of details about how people in those days lived: names of farms, the land people possessed and the size and make-up of families.

Although the sources themselves are mostly just lists of names and data, they are a treasure-trove of information about life in that period. On the site of the Regionaal Archief the information is woven into the history of that period. We have digitized the sources and they can now be viewed in the Regionaal Archief image bank. Because of the high quality, even damage and restaurations are clearly visible. You can view the sources here.

Would you like to know more?
Digitizing historical sources is an excellent way to preserve them, especially when they are very vulnerable. When they can also be made accessible digitally, the originals can be kept safely in storage. We are happy to tell you about the possibilities that Pictura has to offer.

For digitization advice, you can contact our account manager digitization, Jeroen Bloothoofd. If you want more information about our newspaper viewer or a solution for publishing your documents online, you can contact our account manager automation, Cor van der Wal.