SJAC made OCR providers swappable while keeping human correction visible
Bayanat 4 separates document preservation, machine extraction and human review, and shows why those counts should never be merged.
SJAC
Syria
20262 minutes
- Human rights activist
- Legal work and accountability
- Research
- Translation into and out of local languages
Evidence brief
The important architecture is the separation between a preserved file, searchable text and a reviewed record.
What is known
The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre says Bayanat 4, released on 15 April 2026, can route OCR to different providers, including local options through OllamaOllamaOnly approved or redacted sensitive materialOpen sourceMITHas a free version: Running downloaded models locally is free and limited by RAM, storage, and processor speed. Cloud access has separate account and usage terms.View tool. Editors can correct extracted text inline, and the system tracks those changes.
SJAC separately reports preserving and digitizing about 700,000 Assad government documents. Its publication does not say all 700,000 have been analyzed.
What is unknown
No OCR accuracy, language-level error rate, processing count or Kurdish-language result is published. The sources do not compare local and hosted providers on quality, cost or security.
What transfers
Track at least three numbers: files preserved, files processed and files reviewed by a person. Keep originals immutable and attach corrections to the extracted layer. Choose a local or hosted model only after classifying the sensitivity of the documents and the organization’s ability to secure the system.
Workshop question
Can your archive distinguish, at a glance, between a document that is stored, one that is searchable and one a qualified person has reviewed?
What we do not claim
Everything above is limited by what its sources actually prove. This is the part they do not.
SJAC publishes no accuracy figures for Bayanat OCR or the vision models it can call. The reported 700,000 documents are preserved and digitized, not all analyzed. No Kurdish-language performance is documented.