The “Minutes of the Federal Council (1848–1963)” page allows full-text searches of the handwritten minutes from 1848 to 1903 and the typewritten minutes up to 1963. Text recognition for the handwritten minutes is based on the latest AI-supported processes.

▶ Minutes of the Federal Council (1848-1963)

The “Minutes of the Federal Council (1848–1963)” page includes more than 14,500 minutes of decisions. It comprises both the handwritten minutes from 1848 to 1903 and the typewritten minutes from 1904 to 1963.

The texts of over 8,000 handwritten minutes have been machine-read in cooperation with the Walter Benjamin Kolleg Digital Humanities at the University of Bern, using the Transkribus technology. Transkribus is an application from READ-COOP SCE for digitisation and AI-powered text recognition of handwritten documents.

Machine recognition of historical manuscripts is complex. The quality varies depending on the handwriting and language. The error rate for handwritten minutes is between 0.498% and 6.511% character errors, with an average of 3.35%.

You consult the minutes in the Archival IIIF Viewer (IIIF = International Image Interoperability Framework). The viewer is based on the browser application from Mirador.