Design Considerations in Low-Resource Archival OCR: A Case Study in Lakota

Building and expanding access to digital archives supports language reclamation and creates lasting resources for community revitalization. Designing effective tools to support these efforts requires taking into account the community-, language-, and document-specific context. We investigate how small (at most 3B) vision-language models (VLMs) can be adapted as optical character recognition (OCR) tools for Lakota, a North American Indigenous language. In addition to benchmarking modeling approaches, we inspect four practical facets of low-resource archival OCR that arise in previous work and conversations with community members: constrained training budgets, segmentation noise, scan degradation, and orthographic variance. We demonstrate that fine-tuning VLMs for OCR post-correction on 35 pages of transcribed data decreases character error rate (CER) from 17.1 to 3.9% on a bilingual corpus, and find that training only with nine pages increases CER by only 1.1% over this. However, evaluating under realistic automatic segmentation nearly doubles the CER of the best-performing models, stressing the importance of taking realistic use cases into account. We hope this work encourages future research on developing language technologies grounded in the workflows and constraints of ongoing revitalization efforts.