Case Study: DIS-Hordaland increases access to historical records and saves 400 volunteer hours with ABBYY FineReader

ABBYY Helps Genealogy Society Increase Access to and Awareness of Historical Records

DIS-Hordaland, a Bergen section of the Genealogy Society of Norway (DIS-Norge), needed to create a public database of Bergen residents aged 21+ at the 1934 local elections using typewritten and printed parish records and censuses. Volunteers had been manually transcribing records for years, but the group required OCR software that could handle complex layouts, recognize tables, and export editable spreadsheets for direct import into a database.

After testing several options, DIS-Hordaland chose ABBYY FineReader for its reliable table recognition and ease of use; volunteers scanned documents, converted them to Excel, and exported CSVs into the database. The tool cut manual work dramatically—10 pages took about 1 hour 20 minutes versus up to 4 hours by hand, saving an estimated 400 hours and shortening the project from 9–12 months to 3 months—and the published database drew over 44,000 searches in its first two months.

DIS-Hordaland

Tore J. Mehl

Executive Manager