Full text search function now available for the historical address directories and the official handbooks on public offices and institutions

Following substantial revision, full text searches can now be carried out in the historical address directories and official handbooks on public offices and institutions published in the Findbuch for Victims of National Socialism.

This involved reediting the scanned pages, increasing the resolution and contrast, removing black borders and correcting crooked pages. This greatly increased legibility, particularly for small print. By carrying out a black-white compression, the file size of the pages could be reduced at the same time. Following this optimization, an optical character recognition program made it possible to search the address directories and official handbooks electronically, even in the German gothic typeface (Fraktur) often used in these books. The precision of the full text search is largely dependent on the quality of the originals and the scans. Therefore, the full text search cannot replace a visual search by the user but serves as an additional aid.

How to search the address directories and official handbooks

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