Directorate files
1933 – 1945
The museum directorate's correspondence, digitized and searchable. Provenance research as a living archive — opened up page by page.
Starting point
A collection full of answers — but impossible to query.
The directorate files of Museum Ulm document the museum leadership's correspondence from 1933–1945: acquisitions, loans, letters to dealers, authorities, and collectors. For provenance research this collection is a central source — for instance to clarify under what circumstances works entered the collection.
The files had been digitized, but only as image files: not searchable, not structured, not linked to authority data. Every inquiry meant manually leafing through tens of thousands of pages.
The challenge
Historical scripts
A large share of the pages is handwritten in Sütterlin and Kurrent; printed and typewritten documents use Fraktur. Standard OCR fails at both.
Scholarly standards
Provenance research needs verifiable statements: every extracted piece of information must remain traceable to its source — the individual scanned page.
Archival structure
Fonds, folder, correspondence, page: the archival order must be preserved and exportable to standards such as EAD and CIDOC CRM.
The approach
- 01
Preserve the structure
On ingest, the archival order — fonds, folder, correspondence, page — is reconstructed from file names and the filing plan. Deterministic metadata is captured without AI.
- 02
Knowledge becomes an analysis profile
The museum describes its knowledge — cataloging tables, rules, examples. arcafind generates a versioned analysis profile from it: prompt, schema, and test cases, validated on real pages before activation.
- 03
AI analysis with evidence
The AI transcribes Sütterlin and Fraktur and extracts people, places, dates, and events — per document and per page, with an evidence anchor, confidence, and provenance per field. Manual corrections always take precedence.
- 04
Authority data, search, publication
People and places are linked to the GND. Full-text and semantic search are fused; curated results can be shared as publications and exported to EAD or CIDOC CRM.
From the collection
The result
- 01
The collection is searchable — literally and by meaning, across transcript and structured metadata.
- 02
Every extracted statement remains traceable to the scanned page: evidence anchor, confidence, and provenance per field.
- 03
People and places are linked to GND authority data and ready for archival standards (EAD, CIDOC CRM).
- 04
The research team curates the results; publications make curated selections available internally or publicly.
“Every page is evidence. arcafind makes the archive legible.”
Provenance research · Museum Ulm
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