Processing Large‐Scale Archival Records: The Case of the Swiss Parliamentary Records

Abstract

Legislative bodies generally keep records of their activities. While the digitization wave spurred the availability of archival documents, their processing remains a challenge. The Swiss parliamentary records are no exception.In this paper we present a supervised pipeline for extracting and structuring of content of archival records. Our pipeline consists of five steps, starting with an assessment of which elements need extraction and how they relate to each other. Step two involves general pre‐processing to prepare the PDF documents and is followed by an element classification step. Step four involves post‐processing and the final step is a validation of the extracted information. With our supervised approach, we are able to process over 200,000 pages of Swiss parliamentary records (spanning the years 1891–1995), a feat that would exceed the budget of most projects using manual curation. We discuss validation of individual steps and offer guidance to researchers engaged in similar data processing efforts.