SARCLIP: A Scalable CLIP-Based Retrieval System for Seventeenth-Century Spanish American Notary Records

Historical manuscript archives resist standard text search due to inconsistent handwriting, archaic orthography, and the absence of reliable transcriptions at scale. We present SARCLIP (Spanish American Notary Records Meets CLIP), a deployed retrieval system for the National Archives of Argentina’s seventeenth-century Spanish American notary records, a corpus of more than 13.6 million word-image patches spanning over 100 microfilm rolls (“rollos”). SARCLIP is built on a CLIP ViT-B/16 model contrastively fine-tuned on paleography-expert-annotated data, and extends prior work by (1) scaling approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval to the near-complete corpus via a FAISS index, (2) refining top-k results through pseudo-relevance feedback (Rocchio), and (3) closing a human-in-the-loop cycle through visual document browsing, canvas-based patch annotation, and periodic model retraining. Unlike the system’s initial research prototype, which evaluated retrieval on a small five-rollo subset, SARCLIP is demonstrated as a complete, interactive tool operating over the near-complete corpus. Attendees experience the full search, browse, annotate, and retrain workflow live during this demonstration.