Services
The tools are free and you can use them on your own. This page is the work we do for collections that would rather we did it.
Everything on the products pages is open source: install it, run it, change it, and never speak to us. The services below are different. They are work we do for you, for a fee, around those tools and around the systems you already have. Nothing here is required to use the tools.
Catalogue search sites and hosting
A public search site over your catalogue, on your own domain, that we build, keep up to date and run for you.
Your records stay where they are. We pull them in automatically from the catalogue system you already use, so your staff carry on cataloguing exactly as they do now, and the site follows along. What changes is what a visitor can do with them:
- Searches work across scripts and spellings. A reader who types a name in Latin letters finds the record written in Armenian, Georgian, Cyrillic or Syriac, whichever romanisation the cataloguer used, and the other way round.
- Name matching finds every record for a person, whichever of their names or spellings was recorded: the Western and Eastern forms, the pre-reform and the modern, the names a scholar is known by in other languages.
- Galleries and highlights, so the site can show the material you want seen rather than only answering queries.
- Transcripts beside the images, as your digitisation produces them, so the full text of a scanned item is searchable too.
We host it, watch it and update it. You get a site that looks like yours and is found by search engines, and your catalogue stays the catalogue of record.
Collection assessment and advice
Before any software, a look at what you hold: how it is catalogued, in which scripts and spellings, what has been scanned and what has not, and what would make it findable by the people you want to reach. We write up what we find in plain language, with the options and what each would involve, so that a board, a funder or a volunteer group can decide with the facts in front of them. Sometimes the answer is one of our tools; sometimes it is a setting in the system you already have.
Grant applications
Digitisation and access bids stand or fall on their technical and workflow sections: what will be scanned, how the text will be recognised, where the results will live, who will maintain them, and what it will cost over the life of the project. We write those sections with you, cost the technical work honestly, and can be named in the application as the technical partner who will deliver it. We cannot promise that a bid will be funded; we can make sure the technical case is sound and that a reviewer finds nothing to doubt in it.
Training
Hands-on sessions for collections teams using the tools: running Tetrak OCR over a batch of scans and deciding what to do with the triage queue; adding transcripts to a catalogue or an Omeka site; romanising and searching across scripts. Pitched at archivists and librarians, not developers, and built around your own material where you can share it.
Get in touch
The quickest way to reach us is a message on LinkedIn, to either of us:
- Stephen Masters, for the tools, search sites and hosting.
- Yvette Mankerian, for collections, cataloguing and metadata.
Tell us a little about your collection and what you would like to do with it. There is more about the two of us on the about page.