# Ai2 — How researchers are adapting olmOCR 2 for historical and archaeological archives

- Company: Ai2 (allenai.org)
- Announced: 2026-10-28
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://allenai.org/blog/olmocr-2-historical-archives
- Record: https://forck.live/items/28829-how-researchers-are-adapting-olmocr-2-for-historical-and-archaeological-archives
- Subject: Olmo / Molmo / Asta
- Open weights: yes
- Models affected: olmOCR 2

Ai2 is documenting how two research teams adapted its open olmOCR 2 model to historical and archaeological archives, running it locally rather than through commercial APIs. Historian Maurice Casey built ArtificeOCR, which connects locally running vision-language models such as olmOCR 2 to Tropy, the open-source application he uses to organize archival photographs, making his library searchable while preserving metadata entered since 2019. At TU Wien's Computer Vision Lab and the Austrian Archaeological Institute, researchers fine-tuned olmOCR 2 with LoRA on 57 annotated records from a Carnuntum pottery archive of roughly 70,000 records, and transcription error on the remaining 450 test records fell from 15.58% to 1.11%. Of the five open models tested on the team's 507-record CENTURIA benchmark, olmOCR 2 had the lowest transcription error before adaptation. Casey reports strong results with cursive English and typescript, but also errors when the model transcribes handwriting in languages less represented in its training data, and ArtificeOCR is still in early development. The team's next goal is to apply the approach to the full roughly 70,000 pottery records, which the researchers say would make comparisons across the site and between periods tractable.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://allenai.org/blog/olmocr-2-historical-archives:

> olmOCR 2 is Ai2’s open model for extracting searchable, structured text from document images, including handwriting and complex layouts. Its weights, fine-tuning data, and code let researchers run it locally and adapt it to their research needs.
> 
> Researchers have used olmOCR 2 to make archival photo libraries searchable and improve transcription of handwritten archaeological records. ArtificeOCR uses olmOCR 2 on historian Maurice Casey’s own computer to transcribe his photographs of letters, newspapers, and other sources on radical politics in early twentieth-century Europe. CENTURIA adapts olmOCR 2 to transcribe handwritten notes accompanying archaeological pottery drawings from Carnuntum, a Roman site in present-day Austria.
> 
> Searching archives on local hardware
> 
> Maurice Casey, a historian of radical politics in early twentieth-century Europe, works with sources in English, Russian, and German. Over years of research, he accumulated thousands of photographs of letters, newspapers, and other records, taken on different smartphones under varying conditions.

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