Making a two-century archive searchable, one card at a time
How Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts is using AI-powered OCR to preserve around 100,000 historical decedent cards and make them instantly searchable for staff and researchers.
Archivist in the loop
AI-powered OCR applied automatically through a single enrichment policy, removing the manual effort but never the human oversight
Findability at scale
Rich metadata turns Decedent Cards from an invisible, unsearchable file structure into a preserved, fully searchable collection
Time spent on quality, not data entry
AI reads the text on each typed card and makes it fully searchable, meaning time goes into quality rather than repetitive data entry
Challenges
Mount Auburn has preserved its own records since it was founded in 1831, and in 2025 set out to digitize them, starting with its essential business records.
- Records collected and preserved since the Cemetery's founding: deeds to interment rights, superintendents' correspondence, horticultural records, photographs in all formats, financial records, and more
- A new initiative, Digital Business Transformation, aims to digitize the highest priority records, beginning with the business records
- The first and largest collection is the decedent cards, known by some staff as the "Index of the Dead": a typed card, 3 by 2.25 inches, for each of the more than 100,000 people interred and cremated at Mount Auburn
- Cemetery Services staff rely on these cards as reference
- The cards had to be preserved for long term use and, just as importantly, made genuinely searchable
- Scanning them as images alone would never let staff find a single name or date across 100,000 records
Solution
Mount Auburn chose Preservica for Active Digital Preservation™ in a single platform for storage, preservation, and access, then used OCR through Preservica's AI to unlock the typed text on every card. The AI reads each card and makes it fully searchable in the background, so the archivist's time goes into quality, not data entry.
- One platform for storage, preservation, and access, the best fit for both business needs and access goals
- Led by digital archivist Hilary Clifford, who joined in February 2026 after nine years at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation
- Started with the decedent cards, using OCR to make the typed text searchable
- Set it once: an enrichment policy mapped to the decedent cards folder applies OCR automatically on ingest, no per-card work
- Bulk ingest: using OPEX, the team ingests cards in bulk with OCR already applied, ideal for a collection this size
- Accuracy: random quality checks confirm results, with no inaccuracies found so far
- Easy access: staff search by any text, name, or date through the Preservica access portal
- Human-centric: the archivist decides what to ingest and verifies results while OCR handles the high-volume reading, supporting expertise rather than replacing it
Outcomes
Since the rollout began, ingestion has accelerated sharply and the team is moving through the collection far faster than manual processing would allow.
- All decedent cards are now digitized and being ingested incrementally with OCR applied via OPEX
- Progress on the collection is well ahead of manual processing
- Every ingested card is preserved and instantly searchable by staff
- Random quality checks have found no inaccuracies to date
- The work is visible and valuable to upper management and stakeholders, because it underpins Cemetery services
Looking ahead
- Continue incrementally ingesting all 120,000 decedent cards
- Survey the wider holdings for other text documents where OCR can help
- Keep running quality checks as the archive grows
- Extend the initiative beyond business records to institutional records and special collections
