Archives numerisees de Paris

[nberline]

5 000 000 Civil Records of Paris ( up to 1902) have been scanned and can now be seen online:
http://canadp-archivesenligne.paris.fr/index.php
However the process takes time for lack of an indexer!
Nicole Berline, Paris

[logan]

If you discover typewritten documents in this online collection, please let me know, and we can see whether OCR would be helpful. Unfortunately, for handwritten documents, OCR is likely to be useless, except possibly for a large quantity of documents written by a single person (a single notary with terrific penmanship).

-Logan

[nberline]

The documents are indeed handwritten. Thus it is hopeless to OCR the records themselves. But it might be possible for the ' tables decennales" ? Even for those an indexer would be useful: when you ask for a name, you have to " turn pages " in a batch of 21 pages . Moreover you have to do the search by type of records ( BMD) + decade ( decennie) + given name. It takes a lot of time.

[logan]

The problem of having to "turn pages" in each tables decennales search result can't be solved with OCR, I think, but manual indexers (not me!) should be able to do it. The problem of having to specify so many search parameters, instead of just a name, for example, should be easily to solve for the people who designed the site, with the possible exception that their backend search procedure or hardware could be too slow to permit less constrained searching. In that case, if they provided the databases to me, I imagine I should be able to implement a fast enough search procedure, but that would certainly require their cooperation.

-Logan