Zurich Cantonal : Making pre­digital media digitally usable

The is the largest cantonal bank and the fourth largest bank in , with a balance sheet total of over CHF 160 billion, and assets under management of CHF 289 billion.

CHALLENGE “fracture OCR” software had to be vironment. This enables the Zurich Finding relevant text modules found fi rst. And then, of course, there Cantonal Bank to search through text from almost 150 years of archiving were whole shelves full of microfi lm sets that go far beyond the usual Ex- Founded in 1870, the company has an from more recent, but still pre-digital, cel restrictions. extensive historical archive (Histar) with times. minutes and publications from almost The full text search delivers all hits 150 years of banking history. The ar- SOLUTION and arranges them in the desired way. chive is used occasionally by universi- Effi cient text mining for historical It can also be performed as an advan- ties, but mainly for internal inquiries purposes – and for communication ced search, e.g. for document groups from the marketing and communica- needs (minutes of the board of direc tors, com- tions department or the branches. His- Text mining extracts all the informa- pany newspaper, etc.) or as a combina- tar is operated by the InfoCenter of tion contained – 150 million characters, tion of exclusion and inclusion criteria, the . In order to which corresponds to about two mil- e.g. all texts before 1981 in which the use the huge amount of information lion pages – and creates a search mask words “branch” or “foundation” appear (approx. two million pages and growing) in Excel with VBA (Visual Basics for Ap- and “City of Zurich” is not mentioned. effi ciently, even in the digital age, the plication). The search is then converted material had to be processed accord- to the underlying SAS programming Subsequent searches (within a certain ingly. In concrete terms, this means de- language and executed in the SAS en- number of hits) can also be carried out veloping a user-friendly, full text search without having to browse through mi- crofi lm archives or stacks of paper. This is particularly important in view of the 150th Anniversary of the bank in 2020, for which the bank's history is being prepared and various activities and a publication are planned.

First, the documents had to be digi- tized in high quality. The handwrit- ten records from the bank's early years were manually summarized as registers by employees of the Zurich Cantonal Bank. Documents in fracture script also posed special challeng- es for digitiza tion, because a suitable

Case Study Zurich Cantonal Bank gateb.com Added value: • Significant work facilitation thanks to modern text ­m i n i n g ­t e c h n o l o g y • Full-text search within an enormous amount of text

• Advanced search with numerous, individual functions The implemented solution makes • Simple display as text snippets with highlighted search words «our work much easier: Our rese- arch times have been considerably re- • Word clouds, to identify concepts and discover new contexts duced, and the possibility of continuous triage of search results and the display as text snip­pets allow us to find results quickly and easily from our worksta- quickly, thanks to the search mask. The Easy tracking of historical tions. We also repeatedly come across number of returned hits can be re- developments previously unknown and interesting duced to a practical level for historians A common application is the search of contexts. We are very pleased about this by this triage in no time. appendices, which allows the viewing of in view of the Anniversary 2020, and factual material, e.g. tables. Historical this project was a lot of fun! The sensib- Acceleration of text research developments can be easily tracked le use of the latest technology for thanks to flexible user interface with the search mask, be it the develop- historical data is simply a pleasure! ­ A great relief for the Histar project team ment of saving, the ATM or the history Raphaela Ziegler, Head of InfoCenter,­ is that the hits in the surrounding text of the branch. Zurich Cantonal Bank. section are displayed as text snippets and search words are highlighted in color. This user interface ensures that the Zurich Cantonal Bank can carry out text searches and triages faster and automatically.

A great strength of text mining algo- rithms is their ability to automatically correlate words. For example, the name of a board member can be identified by terms that often appear together with this person. Such related terms can be visualized in Word clouds and thus make it possible to quickly and easily identify related concepts and ultimately discover new connections.

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Case Study Zurich Cantonal Bank gateb.com