Digitalisation of Historical Parliamentary Prints and Debates

Birute Leonaviciene
Computer systems programmer, Information technology Department, Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania


One of the main tasks of our Computer Data Processing Department is systematisation of the documents of the Seimas. So we decided to publish all documents of the last term of office of the Seimas in electronic form.

As the final task we have set:

  1. Publish various types of information: text, pictures, and sound;
  2. Information must be accessible as wide as possible;
  3. Users should find required information as quickly as possible.
These purposes determined our choice to publish all information on Compact Disk. We used Microsoft's product Multimedia Viewer Publishing Toolkit to publish and organise information into modern hypertext system, and create full text search engine. In this case we achieved compatibility with virtually all the modern PC's. Requirements for computer are:
  1. PC had been equipped with CD-ROM drive.
  2. A PC with operating system Windows 95 or Windows NT (this software works in with some limitations even on Windows 3.1x).
  3. Video subsystem must support at least 256 colours in order to show graphics properly. Even on systems with lower colour text capabilities works well.
  4. PC must have sound subsystem in order to listen sound records.

The main problem at the beginning was existing of very different sources of information, and huge amount of it. The short hand records were got as PageMaker 4.0 publications (*.PM4 files). We needed to change encoding (as they were coded not in Baltic Rim) and to convert all the files to Rich Text Format (*.RTF files). Some short hands records were lost; they were remaining only in printed form. So we scanned books and used OCR tools (Recognita) to restore the lost information. We used our functioning legal document database (http://rc.lrs.lt/DPaieska.html) to get all the legal acts. Some other data (biography data, etc.) we have got as text files, our department specially for this product created some maps, graphics, scanned photos, etc.

The CD "Seimas92" contains information of the last term of the office of the Seimas (through 1992-1996 period). There is included information such as election results of the Seimas in 1992, most important events of 1990-1996 in Lithuania, short hand records of the Seimas sittings, journals, laws, decisions, resolutions, statements, biographies of the members of the Seimas, the Lithuanian Constitution, and the Statute of the Seimas.

Information structure:

Information Structure


We tried to create a software product witch can be as simply as possible. Firstly - there is nothing to install for a user. Just put the CD into CD-ROM drive - application starts automatically. We have implemented technology that was titled "autorun". It works only on Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0. Users of earlier versions of Windows now can start program manually. As all information is represent in Lithuanian, there is software that enables to setup Lithuanian support on computers without it (there is software for 16 bit Windows (for example Windows 3.1x) and 32bit Windows (for example Windows95, Windows NT) included). "Seimas92" works perfectly in networked environment - a lot of users can use it from one shared CD drive.

Hypertext navigation system ensures easy navigation through CD content - by pressing mouse button, user can jump from one word or phrase to the related topic or picture. Users can see a list of previously viewed topics, and go back choosing one of them, quickly find information in the largest title. There is full-text searching - search an entire title, topic, topic group. Also there is keyword searching - to select a keyword from an index and jump to a topic or topics which keyword is defined in.