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Tools

Six tools, two per corpus — all read-only and all closed-world: they query local LanceDB tables and reach no network.

tool what it does
df_search Full-text search over the 6,876 Diplomatarium Fennicum charters, narrowable by language, place, country and year range.
df_get_charter One charter's full transcript and catalogue record, by DF number.
voudintilit_search Full-text search over the 98,945 pages of the Häme and Satakunta bailiff accounts, narrowable by bailiwick, account book and year range.
voudintilit_get_page One page's full text, citation and Astia link, with the previous and next pages of its volume.
tuomiokirjat_search Full-text search over the 7.8 million pages of Finnish lower-court records, 1610–1931, narrowable by archive, series and year range.
tuomiokirjat_get_page One court-record page's full text, citation and Astia link, with the previous and next pages of its volume.

The workflow

Diplomatarium Fennicum

  1. df_search with a term in the source language and period spelling — Swedish, Latin or German, never modern Finnish.
  2. Read the DF number off a hit. It is the citable identifier, and the only stable handle on a charter.
  3. df_get_charter with that number for the full transcript.
  4. Cite the DF number, and give the reader https://df.kansallisarkisto.fi/document/<number> — the archives' own edition of that charter, carrying the printed-edition references (FMU, REA) and any images.

voudintilit

  1. voudintilit_search with a term in early-modern Swedish — the accounts were kept in Swedish; only the catalogue titles are Finnish.
  2. Read the citation off a hit — reference number, account book, year and page, such as 2372 Ylä-Satakunnan tilikirja 1585, p. 16 — and its page id.
  3. voudintilit_get_page with the page id for the full text. Accounts run across pages, so follow the previous and next page ids it names.
  4. Cite the page as the hit does, and give the reader its Astia link, which opens the page image in Kansallisarkisto's digital archive.

tuomiokirjat

  1. tuomiokirjat_search with a Swedish term — the courts wrote Swedish until the late 19th century — narrowed by collection (the archive: a court's or district's name) and series (the court, or the record type), because common words match more than 10,000 pages.
  2. Read the citation off a hit — series, signum, year and page, such as Helsingin raastuvanoikeuden tuomiokirjat g:87 1792, p. 45 — and its page id.
  3. tuomiokirjat_get_page with the page id for the full text, and the previous and next page ids: a case runs across pages.
  4. Cite the page as the hit does, with the archive named beneath it, and give the reader its Astia link.

What every result carries

A charter

  • The DF number, in bold, first.
  • The dating, rendered as the source states it: a single year, a range, by <year>, or undated. It is never padded into a false range.
  • The place of issue and country, or place of issue unrecorded.
  • Language and index term where recorded.
  • A ~400-character transcript snippet — or (catalogued but not transcribed — no text available) for the 36% of the corpus that has no transcript.

A page

  • The citation, in bold, first: reference number, account book, year and page. The one volume with no year — the Satakunta series' archive catalogue — is cited without one.
  • The collection and the page id, <volume>_<page> — what voudintilit_get_page takes.
  • A ~400-character text snippet, or (no text recognised on this page).
  • The Astia link to the page image, or (no Astia link for this page) where Astia lists no image for it.

A court-record page

  • The citation, in bold, first: series, the volume's signum, year and page — the archive on the line below, with the subseries where there is one, and the page id.
  • A ~400-character text snippet, or (no text recognised on this page).
  • The Astia link to the page image, or (no Astia link for this page) for the 0.05% of pages the export does not link.

Results end with a More results available. Use offset=N line when there is another page.

Errors

Never exceptions — always a sentence:

  • Error: keyword must not be empty. Provide a search term, e.g. 'konung' or 'littera'.
  • Error: year range is inverted — from/min (1500) must be <= to/max (1300). Swap the bounds.
  • The df table is not available on this server. It is built … with make ingest-df, and mounted at KA_LANCEDB_URI; … — a deployment state an operator can fix, so it is explained in full. The voudintilit and tuomiokirjat tools say the same of their own tables, naming make fetch-astia ingest-voudintilit and make fetch-astia-tuomiokirjat ingest-tuomiokirjat.

Anything else is a server fault, and reports only its exception type:

  • Error: the search failed with an internal OSError. It has been logged; please report it if it persists.

The message is deliberately withheld: every condition a caller could act on already has its own sentence above, so the remainder would only disclose internals — lance errors quote the on-disk dataset path. The full traceback is logged server-side.