Untapped data resources. Applying NER for historical archival records of state authorities

Abstract

Archives around the world are digitising their material at a growing speed. The National Archives of Finland launched a mass digitisation process in 2019 aiming to digitise vast amounts of state authorityarchives. In order to improve the access and use of this data by researchers, we present the data transfer process of state authority data and the development of named entity recognition (NER) for enriching and using archival data from state authorities. In this process, we have developed two new named entities that are not included in published NER models for the Finnish language. This work is conducted as part of the DARIAH-FI infrastructure.