AM and the British Library continue digitisation of vast East India Company archives
Discover the astonishing history of the East India Company, which at its peak controlled over a quarter of the world’s trade and millions of the global populace.
The latest East India Company module, ‘India Office Records E: Domestic Life, Governance and Territorial Expansion’, covers a diverse range of subjects including trade, warfare and military matters, as well as pay and administrative appointments and legal affairs.
Comprising correspondence between the East India Company and British Government departments as well as the company’s Bombay and Madras Presidencies, the documents are interspersed with petitions, memorials and letters from individuals and lobby groups.
East India Company uses AM Quartex platform technology to transform handwritten manuscript discoverability. Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) provides an entirely new level of detailed research on this globally significant collection. HTR harnesses artificial intelligence to enable search beyond metadata, offering editable, fully searchable transcriptions of handwritten materials.
The British Library has enjoyed a successful partnership with Adam Matthew for over 30 years. OCR and Handwritten Text Recognition enable new avenues of research, supported by the tools and context on their platforms when they are published.
This week Adam Matthew announced a new name and visual identity. AM will officially reveal their new look at the Charleston Library Conference on Tuesday 1 November. The rebrand coincides with the launch of the new AM website.
We’re now AM, but behind the new name, it’s still the same dedicated team. We’ve been working with the British Library to digitise the East India Company records for the past eight years. With the addition of game changing AI-powered technology like HTR, this is simply an essential resource for scholarship of British imperial history; maritime trade; global commerce, and the history of the first great multinational corporation.
The fifth module from East India Company is available now.
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