A generic recognition system for making archives documents accessible to public

This paper presents annotations needed for handwritten archive document retrieval by content. We propose two complementary ways of producing those annotations: automatically by using optical document recognition and collectively by using the Internet and manual input by users. A platform for managing those annotations is presented as well as examples of automatic annotations on civil status registers, military forms (tested on 60,000 pages) and naturalization decrees, using a generic document recognition method. Examples of collective annotations built on automatic annotations are also given.