Projects

Wordpress Archive

An OCR based archival solution implemented in Wordpress

This was a project for a local sports organisation that we collaborated with during university. The organisation has a long history of more than 60 years and wanted to digitise their archive of old news clippings, pictures, documents, etc. This is mostly a volunteer organisation, so our solution had to prioritise the time of the volunteers. We achieved this by designing a streamlined flow for the volunteers who would be digitising the archive.

The system integrated with the organisations OneDrive to store all images and documents. We created a WordPress plugin that functioned as a Single Page Application implemented in vanilla JavaScript. There the user would pick files from the organisations OneDrive to create a post. This was usually a collection of scanned news clippings or images from past events etc. Our system would then scan the images using an OCR service we had created for the WordPress page. The OCR endpoints used Tesseract OCR to read text in both Norwegian and English from the images. The service would also extract text from PDFs. We used this text to amplify the ability to search for documents.

The archive was displayed to the clubs members using a touchscreen stationed at the organisations club house. The page therefore had to be easy to use with touch gestures. We included web based touchscreen keyboards that users could use to input search terms and other inputs. The system also had a powerful search feature based on the WordPress API.