Moesson, the magazine for readers with ties to the former Dutch East Indies and modern Indonesia, has existed for over 50 years. Now the first 50 volumes of the magazine can be searched and viewed online thanks to Pictura’s Memorix Periodical Viewer.

Festive
Last Tuesday the digital unlocking of 50 volumes of Moesson was announced with a festive presentation. It is about “no less than 27,266 pages full of testimonies from the quietest minority of the Netherlands”. During 50 years the Indonesian community has undergone great development and Moesson has seen that development from up close and has undergone it as well. From a monthly magazine with ‘simple’ design on newsprint to a full color magazine, Moesson kept adapting to the changing times.

Grant
Unlocking the issues from the first 50 years is yet another milestone. Thanks to a grant from the foundation ‘Het Gebaar’ ('The Gesture'), Moesson, which had until then never needed grants to support itself, was able to complete this megaproject. Visitors enter the online archive through the Moesson website.

OCR and indexing
After the originals have been digitized, the content is converted to a result that can be read and searched by a computer. This is done by means of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). For this method, a powerful computer searches through the scanned images to convert all the text on the images into real text. This is not as precise as input by humans, but the results are of such quality that, especially for large quantities as with Moesson, the method greatly reduces the costs.

After the computer has filtered out the text, it is indexed. This process allows the text to be searched quicker and easier. After all, an online search engine should work fast to improve user friendliness.
 

Publication
The images and text are then brought together again by the Periodical Viewer. This is one of the most complete Memorix viewers, bringing together the search engine, the images and the descriptions. Users can search through the text and get to see a list of the results. From that list, images can be summoned with a single mouse click.

Would you like to know more?
If you are interested in the solutions Pictura offers in the field of digitization and conversion from image to text, please contact our account manager digitization, Jeroen Bloothoofd. For the possibilities of publishing in the Memorix Periodical Viewer and for our other automation solutions, please contact our account manager automation, Cor van der Wal.