Document processing for institutional collections

Put difficult records to work.

We turn poor OCR, handwritten ledgers, phone photos, PDFs, and database exports into clean records people can search, connect, and cite.

Each extracted fact keeps a link to the page or record it came from. Your institution keeps custody of the originals.

The information problem

Digitized does not always mean usable.

A folder of TIFFs is not a database. OCR is often incomplete. Names, places, dates, and events remain buried in page images and disconnected files. We do the work between scanning a record and making its contents useful.

What comes in

Existing digital collections

Scanned pages, TIFF collections, PDFs, weak OCR, XML, CSV, and legacy database exports.

What comes in

Records that still need work

Phone photos, handwriting, ledgers, directories, newspapers, and mixed-format collections.

The Kettle refinery

What happens to a collection.

01 · CaptureBring in a collection under agreed access rules.
02 · ReadRun OCR or handwriting recognition and repair page layout.
03 · StructureIdentify documents, people, events, claims, and relationships.
04 · CiteKeep page and document references on extracted records.
05 · TrackAssign stable IDs and record later changes.
What comes out

Records ready to use

Processed text, document sections, normalized fields, people, events, claims, relationships, citations, and data for search or export.

What stays attached

The evidence

A researcher can follow an extracted claim back to the passage, page, document, and collection it came from.

Institutional custody

You keep the originals.

We can work in an institution-controlled environment, a hosted environment, or an air-gapped system. The collection agreement sets the access, storage, and reuse rules.

Where this leads

Add verification when the records are ready.

Stable IDs, signed manifests, and processing logs let another system check a record against an earlier state. Corrections are recorded as new events, so the earlier state remains available.

InstitutionsOpen collections

Give staff and researchers better access to records while keeping local control.

ResearchersCheck the source

Move from a search result to the document and page behind it.

Professional usersUse the data

Support property, government, genealogy, and other research under the collection agreement.

InstitutionsRun the check

Once the public verifier is released, institutions will be able to check records without relying on a private Kettle database.

Start with a sample

Have a collection that is hard to use?

Send a representative sample and tell us what you need from it. We will review the formats, condition, access rules, and likely processing steps.

What do you have, and what do you need from it?