We propose a new database for information extraction from historical
handwritten documents. The corpus includes 5,393 finding aids from six
different series, dating from the 18th-20th centuries. Finding aids are
handwritten documents that contain metadata describing older archives. They are
stored in the National Archives of France and are used by archivists to
identify and find archival documents. Each document is annotated at page-level,
and contains seven fields to retrieve. The localization of each field is not
available in such a way that this dataset encourages research on
segmentation-free systems for information extraction. We propose a model based
on the Transformer architecture trained for end-to-end information extraction
and provide three sets for training, validation and testing, to ensure fair
comparison with future works. The database is freely accessible at
https://zenodo.org/record/7868059