Arcanum

Arcanum is an online publisher that builds enormous, carefully structured databases of digitized cultural material, with a particular focus on Eastern European cultural heritage. It offers a variety of services, including a large digital periodical database, historical maps, poetry, literature and encyclopedias.

Arcanum Newspapers is the largest digital periodical database in Eastern Europe, covering scientific journals, encyclopedias, weekly and daily newspapers. You can search millions of pages and see the entire table of contents for free, but subscribers can see full documents.

The service also includes historical maps that you can explore with modern in-browser technology, including 3D visualization. The collection includes large-scale military surveys, cadastral and city maps, and more. You can measure distances and areas, search for names of settlements, and compare modern and historical maps.

Arcanum employs a variety of technologies to make this possible, including:

• Digitization: Everything from basic scanners to robotic scanners for digitizing newspapers and books.
• Newspaper Segmentation: Breaking down articles into pages, reading order, titles and captions.
• Face Recognition: Locating illustrated pages in the newspaper archive.
• Natural Language Processing: Locating names of people or locations in the newspaper archive.
• Historical Maps: Digital geography from modern to 17th- and 18th-century maps.

The service is free, but you can pay to download high-resolution map tiles for 9.99 EUR each. Institutional customers can incorporate Arcanum Maps into their own websites through subscription plans.

Arcanum also offers a Reference Library, which makes hundreds of previously published digitized books and literary works available online for free. The professionally edited publications cover a wide range of Hungarian culture, including encyclopedias, bibliographies and historical monographs.

Customer testimonials show the value of Arcanum in helping people research and gain access to historical documents, with people appreciating the ability to find specific information about their ancestors and gain access to previously hard-to-reach cultural information.

Arcanum's mission to preserve and share cultural heritage is clear through its broad services and ever-growing databases. Whether you're a researcher or an institution, Arcanum is a great resource to explore Eastern European cultural history.

Published on July 1, 2024