Handwritten minutes of the Federal Council from 1848 now accessible online with text recognition

Bern, 03.02.2022 - The Swiss Federal Archives have put the minutes of the Federal Council from 1848 to 1963 online in a new look. The minutes are an important historical source for the history of the federal state.

For the first time, the handwritten minutes from the period 1848 to 1903 are available with text recognition. They can be searched together with the typewritten minutes up to 1963 using a full text search. In total, the website Protocols of the Federal Council (1848 - 1963) makes more than 14,500 minutes accessible. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in the text recognition of manuscripts. However, much remains to be done. The Swiss Federal Archives is contributing to these efforts with the text recognition of a good 8,000 handwritten minutes of the Federal Council. The project was realised in cooperation with the Walter Benjamin Kolleg Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. The artificial intelligence-supported text recognition procedures use technologies from the European cooperative READ-COOP SCE. Users can consult the transcripts on a modern user interface. For this purpose, the latest technology of the Archival IIIF Viewer is used, which was co-developed by the Swiss Social Archives and is based on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

Address for enquiries

bundesarchiv@bar.admin.ch