Case Study: Aetopia achieves searchable, globally accessible PRONI street directories with ABBYY Cloud OCR

ABBYY Cloud Solution Helps Aetopia Modernise Directories for the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland

Aetopia, a Belfast-based digital asset management firm, partnered with the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) to modernise its Street Directories (1819–1900), a heavily used and increasingly fragile set of volumes at risk of damage from public handling. The challenge was to preserve these irreplaceable records while making their contents fully searchable and accessible to researchers worldwide.

Aetopia digitised ~20,000 pages, stored them in its MediaCore cloud DAM on Microsoft Azure, and used ABBYY Cloud OCR to extract precise positional text and enhance image quality. The new faceted search, search-equivalent terms and term-highlighting delivered fast, global access, reduced wear on originals, scalable cloud processing without extra servers, improved archive management and markedly better service for end users.

Aetopia

Aidan McGrath

Chief Executive Officer