European institutions come together to ease mass digitisation

Project IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) follows EU’s i2010 vision to significantly improve access to Europe’s cultural information. Spearheaded by Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands, the project aims to share expertise from across Europe and establish international best practice guidelines with a view to speeding up, standardising and enhancing the quality of mass digitisation. It will establish a centre of competence for text based digitisation.

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year.

As part of its role, the British Library will lead on one of IMPACT’s four sub-projects, establishing standardisation and the operational context of the work carried out by contributors to the project.

Aly Conteh, e-strategy and information systems, programme manager, British Library said: "It is absolutely vital institutions work together, sharing experiences and resolving the challenges we face in digitising historic texts. To ensure that we deliver the digital resources that are sustainable and meet the expectations of the 21st century researcher.”

British Library team will work on a set of ‘Decision Support Tools' in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners.

Dr Apostolos Antonacopoulos from University of Salford said: “This collaboration presents an opportunity to make a significant world-wide impact on the digitisation of historical documents, by focusing extensive research expertise to exceptional material in both breadth and volume. So far libraries and archives around the world rely on service providers whose best technologies are designed primarily for modern business documents and cannot take fully into account the nuances of and problems posed by ageing books and newspapers.”

Through collaboration IMPACT has already established methods for overcoming issues with geometric correction, border removal and binarisation, and is looking at examples of best practice from around the world, such as the Australian Newspaper Digitisation project's cutting edge application of collaborative user generated corrections, to increase resource discovery success for historic mass digitisation.

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