Cologne Archives: New software helps puzzle – Südwestpresse

Cologne

seven ago years collapsed Cologne city archive. When restoring the destroyed documents a new software designed to help.

Seven years after the collapse of the Cologne City Archive is designed to help assemble completely shredded files and books again a new computer method , Model is the process of saving the Stasi documents. “So that we can in perspective together the recovered approximately two to three million archival fragments again to all sides,” said the director of the Historical Archives, Bettina Schmidt-Czaia.

The torn pages for a special spotlight gently cleaned – in principle they are blown clean with small paper grains. After making a Scanner high-precision shots and delivers it to a software that analyzes, for example, color, font and crack edges and tried the snippets together like a puzzle, again. Let

The making of people who would be out of sight been virtually no prospect of Schmidt-Czaia. “I would say it this way: It is absolutely unacceptable if they are to piece together a puzzle with three million parts.”

The new method for the snippet was largely developed by a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute. The end of 2015, the scanner went into operation. Notes gave, among other members of the Bundestag who know the possibilities of the virtual restoration of Stasi files. Quite comparable but the cases are not. In Cologne, the pages

The “Cologne Flakes” were not shredded but plunged into a gorge and were thereby torn in very different ways.

said tear pieces represent only a part of the spilled material from which recovered to a large extent could be. times an entire file, even a single sheet – – end of 2015 well 600 000. so-called rescue units had already been interested for usable again. Or 35 per cent of the salvaged archival

The archive had collapsed on March 3, 2009, two people were killed. The debris also buried 30 linear kilometers of documents.