Large-scale Systems and Applications

Here we outline how the PrIx technologies presented throughout this book have been implemented into actual search and retrieval systems which provide fast and effective access to the textual contents of many important series of historical manuscripts. We cover in detail five of these systems, which support large series provided by the French Archives Nationales, the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional and Archivos Nacionales, the British UCL Library, and the Finnish Kansallisarkisto (National Archives of Finland). All these large-scale demonstrators are publicly available through the Internet and provide a broad array of searching tools. Specifically, wildcards and approximate or flexible spelling are supported at character level and at word level, word-sequences and all kinds of multi-word Boolean combinations are allowed, including geometrical-proximity conditioned conjunction (AND).