The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) is pleased to announce that the Departmental Letterbooks, part of Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) RG 10 fonds, have been fully transcribed through CRKN and LAC’s intelligent character recognition (ICR) pilot project. This project, launched in 2022 to transcribe handwritten materials in the Héritage collection with the artificial intelligence tool Transkribus, will make a portion of the RG 10 materials on Héritage full-text searchable, and is the beginning of our long-term goal of harnessing emerging technologies to make the entire Héritage collection more discoverable.
The Departmental Letterbooks, drawn from the RG 10 sub-collection “Records relating to Indian Affairs,” contain information about the activities of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1871 to 1929 and are an important resource for Indigenous claims researchers and historians. Largely handwritten, the Letterbooks will now be significantly easier to navigate thanks to their transcription with Transkribus software, which will allow users to search within the full text of the Letterbooks and download searchable PDFs of documents. Resources to aid in searching the Departmental Letterbooks and other RG 10 materials are available on the CRKN website.
The Departmental Letterbooks are the first batch of material selected by CRKN and LAC for the ICR pilot project, comprising approximately 600,000 pages of digitized images. Upcoming batches of material will include further selections from the sub-collection “Records relating to Indian Affairs,” with the goal of supporting researchers studying topics related to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit history in Canada. READ-COOP, the developer of Transkribus, is a non-commercial cooperative and data used in the project is not shared with third parties.
CRKN has benefitted from the expertise of our community throughout this project. We would like to thank Maxime Gohier, Professor at Université du Québec à Rimouski and the team at Les Gardenotes for their technical assistance, Jim Clifford and Ben Hoy at the University of Saskatchewan for providing their research resources, and LAC staff for their collaboration. We look forward to continuing our work to enhance the research potential of digital heritage collections.
For more information about the ICR pilot project, please contact Francesca Brzezicki, Heritage Engagement Officer, at fbrzezicki@crkn.ca.