Emerging technology preserving memories & history

The Arolsen Archives — International Center on Nazi Persecution maintains the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of Nazism. Part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World, the archive includes information on some 17.5 million people from the various victim groups. These documents are valuable as historical records but also an important source of knowledge for society today.

Through its #everynamecounts project, the center is digitizing and indexing its 110 million documents and objects, including camp registrations, transfer lists, prisoner lists and family member inquiries. The task is massive in scale and complexity. When relying solely on manual indexing, a volunteer transcribes about four documents per hour, a rate that could take decades, if not longer, to digitize the collection.

Working with Accenture, volunteers and historians, the center is dramatically accelerating the speed of digitization, indexing the documents more rapidly than it ever has before.

Accenture’s Solutions.AI is a collection of artificial intelligence solutions designed to unlock new efficiencies and growth, enable new ways of working and facilitate game-changing innovation. To support human volunteers, the Arolsen Archives is tapping into artificial intelligence, optical character recognition and other emerging technologies within Solutions.AI for Processing.

Through this human-machine collaboration, the organization is entering an estimated 40X more documents per hour into a searchable database.

The Arolsen Archives and Accenture prioritized digitization of documents considered too difficult for humans to read and transcribe. That difficulty may be due to a variety of factors, including weathering, illegible entries and/or inaccuracies. AI technologies — with continual instruction by humans — are enabling faster, more accurate digitization of these documents.