This data and the online search platform historic.localsearch makes old telephone telephone directory entries through a public and free online database accessible to everyone. historic.localsearch was created through the collaboration between the PTT archive, the Digital Humanities at the University of Bern and localsearch.
The aim is to make historical data accessible to a broad public.This repository contains the basis of historic.localsearch.ch. All tsv are in the folder "tsv". The tsv can be loaded to the SQL-DB.
All data has been processed automatically, based on the OCRed phone book data. OCR errors are to be expected on several levels:
- Error in recognized characters (no specific training for used printings)
- Error in the layout identification. In several cases the columns have not been correctly identified, mixing the entries
- Mixing advertisment with phone number entries.
As a consequence, three different batches have been built:
- A – Data from the beginning to 1910: Data on the level of pages
- B – Data from 1911 to 1937: Data on the level of segmented entries
- C – Data from 1938 to 1950: Data on the level of unsegmented entries
In the folder "code_manual_replacement" a bash script and a document of the replaced strings can be found.