Saving our cultural heritage - Engaging new users across all of Denmark | Anette Larner #TUC22
Channel: Transkribus
Date: 10/10/2022

Anette Larner, Aarhus City Archives
Saving our cultural heritage; Engaging new users across all of Denmark
This talk will present some of the achievements and challenges of the ongoing, leading Transkribus-project in Denmark, RetroDigitalisering, headed by Aarhus City Archives on behalf of the Organization of Danish Archives. The paper introduces how we are working towards achieving the goals of digitizing decentralized documents through participation and training of local archives and a growing group of primarily senior volunteers nationwide.
The main purpose of the project is to secure Danish cultural heritage by digitizing key sources of Danish local history and in the same process developing models for the machine-recognition of gothic handwriting. The ability to read Gothic handwriting is rapidly disappearing, and in a generation or two, virtually no one will be able to read our handwritten Danish documents pertaining our cultural and social heritage. With the involvement of local archives and volunteers across the country, the project is working towards achieving the goal of digitizing millions of documents of the country’s archival material concerning Danish municipalities' basic historical documents: the protocols from parish councils and city councils from 1842-1950.
As part of this effort, the project has set out to engage local archives and volunteers and are currently training them to become transcription specialists at workshops all over the country with the view to make them self-sufficient and capable to further train new users and project participants for the future. This paper will present some of the experiences and impressions we have gathered so far from this endeavor and crowdsourcing for the inspiration of others.