Exploring new historical sources

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The Hessian State Archives have the task of preserving the archival material stored in their magazines, to protect it from fragmentation, to open it to the public as authentic cultural material, and to contribute to explore it as a house of history. To this end, it is increasingly focussing on archival description and digitization of the holdings.The selected stocks are Stockbücher, Brandkataster and topographische Güterverzeichnisse. These sources unfold their full historical significance only in their breadth, which is hardly achievable through physical consultation, and moreover contain a large number of person and place names ("named entities"). The documents will be digitized and partly described on a more detailed level. Special attention will be paid to the treatment of named entities. Finally, the documents will be presented together with the corresponding maps in the database Arcinsys. Through the digital supply of the material on the net, the Hessian State Archives not only provides very little known sources for historical research, but also contributes to the discussion of current developments between archival science and computer scientists (Handwritten Text Recognition, Named Entities Recognition, librarian and archival Standard Files and Data). The selected stocks, which meet almost all the criteria required by the German Research Association, amount to approximately 10,400 volumes with an estimated 2,600,000 images (1 image = 1 double page). The data will be available in Open Access and imported into the relevant portals. The project is part of the strategy Archival Description and Digitization pursued by the Hessian State Archives.