Comment by demosthanos

The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:

> The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.

They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.

It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.