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For city, municipal and state archives

Historical council minutes — finally searchable.

Turn handwritten Ratsprotokolle from four centuries of Kurrent, Sütterlin and Latin hands into full-text searchable records. We scan, transcribe and publish — or you run it yourself on the Transkribus platform.

Kurrent & SütterlinFull-text searchManaged projectEU-hosted
Book a consultationHow we work

European servers · GDPR compliant · No data transfer to third countries

200M+
Pages already processed
95%+
Accuracy on trained models
300+
Pre-trained HTR models
2,000+
Archives and libraries on Transkribus

Why archives choose Transkribus for council minutes

Built for the holdings city, municipal and state archives actually have — not generic OCR.

City archivesMunicipal administrationsDistrict archivesCouncil chanceriesCity librariesState archives

Protect the originals

Scan once, handle never again. Fragile volumes stay in the depot while scholars and citizens work with the digital copy.

Full-text search

Find every mention of a person, place or decision across decades of minutes — including historical spelling variants.

No IT infrastructure required

Everything runs in the browser on European servers. No local installation, no server room, no ops team.

Public access

Publish as a Transkribus Site with your own branding — or keep it internal. You decide who sees what.

Education & research

Teachers, students and historians can actually read your holdings. Material that was effectively invisible becomes accessible.

Fundable

Digitisation projects qualify for regional, national and EU funding. We help you scope a fundable proposal.

From scan to transcription

Why manual transcription of Ratsprotokolle is no longer realistic

A mid-sized city archive can easily hold tens of thousands of handwritten council pages in Kurrent, Sütterlin, Latin and Swiss hands. Transcribing them by hand would take decades of paleographic work and still leave most of the material invisible. Transkribus was built for exactly this problem: modern HTR models read the scripts, layout analysis handles tables and marginalia, and every word stays linked to the original page image.
Batch-process thousands of pages with one click
300+ pre-trained models for Kurrent, Sütterlin, Bastarda, Fraktur and Latin
Additional training on your specific hands available
Export as searchable PDF, PAGE XML, ALTO or plain text
Book a consultation
Historical council minutes from Kappel

Holdings that were invisible for centuries — now in full text

From the 16th century into the early modern period: Ratsmanuale, Stadtbücher, chancery files. Transkribus reads what generations of archivists could only leaf through, and ties every line back to the original image location. Every transcription stays verifiable — not a black-box AI, but checkable paleography.
Book a consultation
Council minutes from Sankt Gallen

Your goals, our approach

Every archive starts differently and targets something different. Pick the variant that fits — or combine several.

Variant 01

Public online edition

Publish your transcribed council minutes as a branded Transkribus Site with full-text search, navigation and metadata.

Variant 02

Internal searchability

Keep everything behind your firewall. Staff and researchers on-site get full-text search; the public sees nothing unless you decide otherwise.

Variant 03

Internal + selective release

Transcribe everything, publish what the law and your release calendar allow. Granular per-volume access control.

Variant 04

AIS integration

Push the transcribed text back into your archive information system (scopeArchiv, AUGIAS, faust, AtoM…) as full-text indexes.

Variant 05

Yearly release cycles

Define a rolling window (e.g. always release the year that just crossed the 30-year protection period). We deliver annually.

Variant 06

Something else

We have worked with archives across the DACH region — bring us your constraints, deadlines and funding situation and we will scope it.

From practice

Archives already running on Transkribus

A small selection of public council-minutes and administrative-records sites. Each one started exactly where you are now.

Deutsche Ratsprotokolle 17. bis 19. Jh.
Germany

Deutsche Ratsprotokolle 17. bis 19. Jh.

German Council Minutes 17th to 19th century (Kurrentschrift)For the town of Bautzen, the municipal archives have a relatively complete record of the official...

53K pages
Published Nov 2024
Staatsarchiv St.Gallen
Switzerland

Staatsarchiv St.Gallen

Regierungsratsprotokolle 1803–1904Die an den wöchentlichen Sitzungen der Regierung gefällten Beschlüsse sind samt den zugehörigen Erwägungen in den sogenannt...

194K pages
Published Dec 2023
Staatsarchiv Obwalden
Switzerland

Staatsarchiv Obwalden

Regierungsratsprotokolle des Kantons Obwalden 1850–1900Das Staatsarchiv Obwalden ermöglicht auf dieser Seite eine Volltextsuche in den Regierungsratsprotokol...

20K pages
Published Jan 2025
Staatsarchiv Schwyz
Switzerland

Staatsarchiv Schwyz

Regierungsratsprotokolle 1848-1927Durchsuchen Sie auf dieser Website die handgeschriebenen Regierungsratsprotokolle des Schwyzer Regierungsrates. Darin finde...

118K pages
Published Aug 2023
Regierungsratsprotokolle des Kantons St.Gallen 1803-1831
Switzerland

Regierungsratsprotokolle des Kantons St.Gallen 1803-1831

Die an den wöchentlichen Sitzungen der Regierung gefällten Beschlüsse sind samt den zugehörigen Erwägungen in den sogenannten Verhandlungsprotokollen festgeh...

39K pages
Published Sep 2023

Your archive here

The next reference project could be yours.

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What we work with

Kurrent, Sütterlin, Latin — and everything in between

Hundreds of pre-trained HTR models cover the major German-language scripts and Latin. Where the hand is too specialised, we train a custom model on your holdings. Layout analysis handles tables, marginalia and multi-column council manuals.
Council minutes from the 16th century onwards
Kurrent, Sütterlin, Kanzlei, Bastarda, Fraktur, Latin
Custom model training on your specific hands
Searchable PDF/A output with an invisible text layer
Book a consultation
Council minutes from Bautzen
Privacy & security

Your records stay in Europe — and under your control.

Transkribus is built and operated in Europe by a cooperative. No hyperscaler, no US parent, no data transfer to third countries.

Server location: EU · GDPR compliant · No data transfer to third countries

European servers

All data is processed and stored in data centres inside the EU. No transatlantic replication.

GDPR compliant

Data processing agreements, access logs and deletion rights are built in from day one.

Data sovereignty

You own your content. Export everything as open formats at any time — no vendor lock-in.

Granular access control

Per-collection roles, public/internal toggles, and read-only modes for research use.

Protection periods, freedom of information & publication

Transcribing a volume in Transkribus does not automatically publish it. Transcription and publication are two separate decisions. You can transcribe behind closed doors, respect Schutzfristen and informational self-determination, and then publish volume by volume as your release calendar allows. We support you with the technical controls — the legal assessment stays with your archive.

Frequently asked questions

Answers to the things municipal and state archives usually ask us first.

Ready to make your records accessible?

Book a free 30-minute consultation. We will look at a sample of your material, estimate scope and cost, and discuss funding options.

Book a consultation

Managed project or self-service — we are happy to discuss both.