Tetrak makes archive collections readable and searchable, especially in scripts that mainstream software serves poorly.
Much of the world’s cultural history is looked after by small, independent libraries and community archives. They often hit two problems at once: off-the-shelf archive software can’t read or search their scripts, and the systems that can are priced for large institutions.
We work on both. We publish free, open-source tools that turn scans of old printed text into searchable text, starting with Armenian, and that make it possible to search across scripts, so someone who types a name in Latin letters finds the record written in Armenian, Georgian, Cyrillic or Syriac. And we work with collections teams directly: assessing what they hold, building and hosting search sites for their catalogues, and helping with the technical side of grant applications.
Free, open source, and yours to use without us.
Turns scans of old print into searchable text, on your own machine. It runs several OCR (optical character recognition) engines over each file, keeps the best reading, and sets aside anything it cannot trust for a person to check.
A recogniser we trained ourselves for printed Armenian, in both the Eastern and the Western language and either spelling. Free to install on its own, and the engine Tetrak OCR uses for Armenian pages.
Transliteration and cross-script search
Works out which script a piece of text is in, writes it in Latin letters by the library standards, and reduces every spelling of a name to one form so that a single search finds them all. Armenian, Georgian, Russian and Syriac.
The tools are free and you can use them on your own. When you would rather have us do the work, we build and host search sites over catalogues, with searches that work across scripts and spellings; look at what a collection holds and what would make it findable; write the technical side of grant applications; and train collections teams on the tools. What we do for collections.
Ephrem the Syrian is catalogued as ʾAprém, Afrem, Ephraem and ܐܦܪܝܡ, and the script itself writes no vowels at all. We have added Syriac to tetrak-translit with a fold that keys on consonants alone, and this is what that buys, what it costs, and where we would welcome the help of people who read Syriac
Our page-orientation method leant on Latin letters carrying more ink above the line than below it. We measured whether Armenian letters do the same. They do not, and the measure that works for them does not work for English
A search fold is a claim about which spelling differences do not matter, and a library catalogue is where that claim gets tested. We run our Armenian fold against a real catalogue on every release, chart its whole history, and let a continuous integration check fail on the loss of a single record