NARA Catalog - Finding OCR Results
When you do a search in the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) Catalog at https://catalog.archives.gov/ certain results are returned if the word or phrase you're looking for has been found in documents that have been processed using optical character recognition (OCR).
Unfortunatley the NARA catalog has no way of indicating which page the relevant result is located on. If the document is only several pages this may not be a problem but frequently this happens in a digitized PDF document, which may be hundreds of pages of long.
There is a somewhat cumbersome workaround.
1) Request an API Key
Send an e-mail to: api@nara.gov . Your message can be short: "Please send me an API Key."
2) Create an account at http://web.postman.co/
Visit http://web.postman.co/ and create an account.
3) Click on Workspaces then on Create Workspace
4) Click on Workspaces then on Create Workspace
Choose "Blank Workspace" then click on the orange "Next" button at the bottom
5) Click on Workspaces then on Create Workspace
Fill in a name - and select who can access your workspace, personal is generally good
then click the "Create" button
5) Click on the + sign and then choose "blank collection"
6) Under New Collection click on "Add a Request"
7) Add your API Key
On the Authorization section:
Change Type to: API Key
Where key is on the right enter: "x-api-key"
Where value is: copy and paste the API Key you received via email into the value field
8) Insert the API request
Copy and paste the following URL into the "GET" field:
https://catalog.archives.gov/api/v2/records/search?naId=100100100&includeExtractedText=true
9) Search on the NARA Catalog
When you find a relevant result note the NAID in the URL at the top of the page
it's both in the URL and located under the file subject name (see numbers circled in red)
10) Return to the web.postman.co website
Change the 100100100 in the URL (https://catalog.archives.gov/api/v2/records/search?naId=100100100&includeExtractedText=true) to the NAID that you found in the catalog.
Click the Send button
This will populate results in the bottom portion of the screen.
Click on the Magnifying glass so that you can search for your original search term
11) Enter your search term in the box below
here the search term example is Wimpfheimer
You will be searching in the OCR text as shown below. When you find the term you're looking for note the information below.
You can navigate directly to the image by clicking on or copying the objectURL. For example:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/39/2875/27287539/content/dc-metro/rg-059/M367/M367_Box_6_229-280/M367_Roll279/M367_Roll279-0394.jpg
You can also note the number at the end of the file name, here ""M367_Roll279-0394.jpg", which means that the number 394 corresponds to the location of the image.
You can go back to NARA and naviagte to that page.
