Peter Baumann, 83, explains how Easy PDF Search

helped him work with his collection of over 11,000

historical documents stored in PDF files.

I have always been interested in historical topics, especially in relation to my home town of

Magdeburg. Unfortunately, there was little time for this interest in my professional life.

About 25 years ago, on the occasion of Magdeburg's 1200th anniversary, I began collecting material on a special topic - the

city's drinking water supply. I used books, magazines and newspaper reports as well as documents from the city archives as

sources. I copied a lot of information by hand and entered it into the computer at home.

Since I wasn't familiar with, didn't know or didn't have access to auxiliary programs, I collected my data in a spreadsheet and

used the search and sorting functions of this program, which seemed gigantic to me. This enabled me to write the text for a

book that was published in 2005. When I retired 18 years ago, I used my free time intensively to pursue my interest in history.

In the meantime, archives, universities, foundations and others had

begun to digitize historical documents in the form of PDF files and

make them available on the Internet. This provided me with data

that allowed me to explore more than just chronological links to my

areas of interest.

However, in order to analyze such documents effectively, there were

a few hurdles to overcome. I needed to be able to search

specifically for answers to my questions.

With around 11,000 documents in my database, this is not possible without machine assistance. One major problem is books

in the Fraktur script formerly used for German prints. Due to the many different font variants, these can unfortunately only be

converted into machine-readable form with the help of OCR to a limited extent. At least for me as an amateur computer user. I

have passionately tried all the editing and search programs I know, but unfortunately have not achieved any really good

results.

That changed about two years ago when I discovered Easy PDF Search. This program can't perform miracles either, but it

offers a good balance between recognition rate and speed. With my "biggest chunk", an almost 9 GB work with more than

1600 pages from the year 1567, the search time is already in the higher minute range, but with libraries of 5000 files in "normal"

size it is only seconds. The ability to use Boolean expressions is a great advantage when formulating complex queries.

The "generosity" of my tolerance for terms not found is partly due to the fact that centuries-old works often use expressions

that the best program cannot associate with the search query. Language has also evolved and the person asking the question

must take this into account - the searcher (program) cannot be expected to do so.

With the help of Easy PDF Search, it has become easy for me to exchange ideas with other "hobby historians" in Internet

forums about our common interests and the results of our searches for content and contexts.

I would not want to do without the program and can only warmly recommend it, especially as the service is excellent.