Skip to content
  • Prijzen
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.

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 Stadt-, Gemeinde- und Staatsarchive actually have — not generic OCR.

City archivesMunicipal administrationsDistrict archivesCouncil chanceriesMunicipal 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 old 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. Open up material that has been effectively invisible.

Fundable

Digitisation projects qualify for regional, national and EU funding. We can 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 — Kurrent, Sütterlin, Latin and Swiss hands, spanning three or four centuries. Transcribing them by hand would take decades of paleographic work and still leave most of the material unsearchable. Transkribus was built for exactly this problem: modern HTR models read the scripts, layout analysis handles tables and marginalia, and the transcription is automatically linked to the page image so every word stays verifiable.
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
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.
See Kurrent models
Council minutes from Sankt Gallen

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
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.

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