Order books recording machinery purchases for sugar manufacturing and related engineering industries from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.

Explore articles and interpretations about these order books from the Mirrlees Watson Co Ltd collection.

Transcribing the Mirrlees Watson Order Books

Transcribing historical documents is typically a time-intensive and specialised task but handwritten text recognition (HTR) platforms promise to simplify this process by automating the process and using language learning models trained upon large volumes of historical documents...

 

The order books available on this platform were digitised in 2026 as part of the University of Glasgow's Digital Research Collections programme to improve access and discovery while supporting the long-term preservation of the original volumes. Collection metadata was reviewed and enhanced to improve consistency and optimise it for the platform.

The volumes were transcribed using handwritten text recognition (HTR) software to support accessibility and keyword searching. As part of this work, different transcription approaches were tested across the collection. Because of this, variations in quality and consistency may exist between volumes. HTR-generated text may contain errors or omissions, particularly where handwriting, page layout, or the condition of the original records affected the accuracy of text recognition.