Illuminating Royalty: William & Mary Libraries Partner on Georgian Papers Programme

From the College of William & Mary:

In spring 2015, William & Mary and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture partnered with the Royal Archives and King’s College London on the Georgian Papers Programme (GPP). The GPP is a five-year project to make available online the historic manuscripts relating to the Georgian monarchy, by the year 2020. Most of these papers relate to George III, although papers from the reigns of George I, George II, George IV and William IV are also included.
The partnership will work together to create an open, discoverable online archive of 350,000 digitized items. Approximately 85 percent of the items are unknown to scholars.
“The project provides a unique opportunity for librarians and students from William & Mary to work on an international digital project, growing our expertise and learning from our colleagues,” said Carrie Cooper, dean of university libraries. “Working with King’s College London and the Royal Archives is an honor and a privilege.”
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In January the GPP portal launched with 30,000 digitized documents accessible across the globe. To date, 1,600 pages have been transcribed.
For the project, W&M Libraries is utilizing Transkribus, a handwritten text recognition tool, which eliminates having to manually transcribe each of the 350,000 documents. Instead student assistants transcribe small sets of documents that are used to inform or “train” the tool to decipher the handwriting and build a model. The model is used to analyze or “read” the handwriting of non-transcribed documents and produce a transcription.

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See Also: New Digital Collection: Documents from King George III Go Online (January 28, 2017)e

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