The Succeed project has recently been rated ‘Excellent ‘ by the European Commission. The final evaluation of the Succeed project took place on19th of February 2015, at the University of Alicante, during a meeting of the committee of experts appointed by the European Commission (EC) with the Succeed consortium members. The meeting was chaired by Cristina Maier, Succeed Project Officer from the European Commission.
Succeed has been funded by the European Union to promote the take up and validation of research results in mass digitisation, with a focus on textual content. For a description of the project and the consortium, see our earlier post Succeed project launched.

The outputs produced by Succeed during the project life span (January 2013-December 2014) are listed below.

Impact Interoperable Platform

Succeed further improved the Impact Interoperable Platform which allows users to test and combine a number of digitisation tools. The tools are made available as web services by a number of different providers, allowing the user to try them out online without having to install any of these tools locally. During the Succeed project, 20 new tools were integrated. The platform currently supports the online testing of 40 tools. Moreover, the option to execute workflows with the Taverna workflow Management System and MyExperiment has been added to the demonstration platform so that the user can define multistage processes (even processes involving input from multiple sub-processes) when several tools operate on the input. The interoperable platform has been integrated into the Impact Centre of Competence website to reinforce sustainability. The current version of the platform provides access to the open data-sets created by the Impact project – 250,000 high-resolution images and 30,000 ground truth files – with the recent addition of a specific viewer which allows the complete collection to be navigated.

Validation and take-up of tools

An overview with nearly 260 useful tools and resources for text digitisation has been compiled and published online. This online catalogue supports the filtering of tools and resources by their type and target language.

As part of the Succeed project, over 20 tools in this catalogue have been tested for validation and take-up in the productive environments of 13 libraries in several European countries. The National Library of the Netherlands also participated.

The tools included in this take-up programme supported a variety of workflows, including, among others, image processing and enhancement; image segmentation and layout analysis; text processing operations (i.e. named entity recognition); and evaluation of the output.

At the end of the project, 11 tools were successfully integrated into libraries’ productive environments. The National Library of the Netherlands implemented the Lexicon service which was developed by INL, the Institute for Dutch Lexicology, into the website Delpher. See also our previous blog post on Take-up of tools within the Succeed project.

Recommendations for digitisation projects

Succeed published two sets of recommendations for digitisation projects: the first one for metadata and data formats used in text digitisation and a second one for common licensing schemes for tools and resources.

The first report builds on existing recommendations and guidelines for metadata and data formats as well as ongoing initiatives. The analysis covers long-term preservation, online delivery, as well as advanced and supporting technologies.

The second report compiles existing licensing schemes and analyses their current usage by consulting a number of organisations, the inventory of tools for digitisation created by Succeed –containing more than 200 items–, and also popular software repositories such as SourceForge and GitHub.

Succeed events

The organisation of several events served to disseminate the latest technology for the digitisation of text. The events organized by Succeed are listed below.

• The Succeed Developers’ Workshops promoted the involvement of the community of programmers and developers in the further development of tools and services for digitisation. The First Developers’ Workshop took place at the National Library of the Netherlands on September 19-20, 2013. The Second Developers’ Workshop took place at the Universidad de Alicante on April 10-11, 2014.
• The Succeed tutorial State-of-the-art Tools for Text Digitisation was held in Valleta (Malta), September 22, 2013, in the framework of the TPDL 2013 conference. The tutorial aimed to present the latest technology for image enhancement, OCR, post-correction, logical structure analysis, lexicon building, deployment and enrichment. It gathered attendees from 15 cultural heritage institutions.
• The Succeed Workshop on interoperability of digitisation platforms took place at the National Library of the Netherlands (October 2, 2014). Nineteen researchers, librarians, and computer scientists from several European countries participated in the workshop.
• The Digitisation Days brought together 182 participants from complementary communities: researchers, companies and practitioners. The event took place on May 19-20, 2014 in Madrid. Also see our earlier blog post on this topic.
• The principal results of the project were presented at the Succeed final conference (November 28, 2014). The event took place in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and brought together nearly 70 experts in the field of digitisation and cultural heritage. 

Succeed awards

Two editions of the Succeed awards have been organised with the objective of evaluating state-of-the-art technology, addressing particular stages of the digitisation workflow like segmentation and recognition.

The first Succeed awards distinguished the best initiatives in the application of advanced technology for the digitisation of historical texts. 18 submissions were judged by Succeed’s Expert Advisory Board. The following institutions were presented with awards during the Digitisation Days in Madrid:
• Hill Museum and Manuscript Library.
• Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance.
• Tecnilógica (Commendation of Merit).
• London Metropolitan Archives – University College London (Commendation of Merit).

The second edition recognised the best performance in the validation and take-up of digitisation tools promoted by Succeed. Among the 9 external participants, the following libraries received awards during Succeed’s final conference in Paris:
• Library of KU Leuven.
• National Library of Finland (Commendation of Merit).
• University Library of Wroclaw (Commendation of Merit).

Map of the European digitisation landscape

A map of the European digitisation landscape, compiling over 380 active projects, centres of competence, companies, public institutions and networks. An online search platform, developed by Succeed, allows for a highly usable access to the information therein. A registration gateway allows for personalised access and for maintenance of the information by the community.

Roadmap for sustainable centres of competence

A Roadmap for sustainable centres of competence to support digital libraries which provides insight into the capacity to support the evolution of European digital libraries through centres of competence. After investigating the main technical, capacity-related and economic challenges, some actions are proposed to advance the state-of-the-art as regards mass digitisation of cultural heritage in Europe in three respects: capacity building, advance of technology and sustainability.

Delpher

Delpher is a joint initiative of the Meertens Institute of Research and documentation of Dutch language and culture, the university libraries of Amsterdam (UvA), Groningen, Leiden and Utrecht, and the National Library of the Netherlands, to bring together the otherwise fragmented access to digitized historical text corpora.

Delpher currently contains over 90.000 books, over 1 million newspapers, containing more than 10 million pages, over 1.5 million pages from periodicals, and 1.5 million ANP news bulletins that are all full text searchable. New content will continually be added in the coming years.

Since the initial launch in November 2013 we received several suggestion for improvement or bug fixes. On the 20th of November 2014, exactly one year after the initial launch, a new version of Delpher was released. In the new version, the most important of these issues are solved. Delpher is now also mobile friendly, the overall user interaction is improved and the INL Lexicon Service was added.

The INL Lexicon Service

Delpher contains content ranging from the 17th until the 20th century. In this time period, the spelling of words has changed frequently. Doing a full text search in Delpher for the word koninklijke (royal) in the historical newspaper results in 1.207.342 newspaper articles, the oldest one dating back to 1674. During the mentioned time period, the word koninklijke had many spelling variants. A Delpher user who is unaware of these variants may miss out on many relevant resources. The importance of this issue was underlined by the ‘golden tip’ (in Dutch) provided by one of our users in the summer of 2014, i.e. to include a number of different spellings in search requests.

As part of the Succeed project, the Lexicon service as developed by INL, the Institute for Dutch Lexicology, was integrated in Delpher to tackle this problem. The INL LexiconService is a webservice that gives online access to the GiGaNT lexicon of 15th to 20th century Dutch by means of http requests.

Using the Lexicon Service, a user searching for “koninklijke” is now offered 14 spelling variants of “koninklijke”. After selecting one or more variants, the query is automatically expanded to an OR query including the selected variant(s). Searching for example for koninklijke or conincklicke or konincklijcke or koninglijk or koninglijke or keuninklijke or koningklyk gives 8.525 more results, the oldest one dating back to 1649. The implementation of the Lexicon Service in Delpher shows how it may be used in a library catalogue. For a complete overview of the possibilities of the webservice, please see the Succeed Wiki.

Try it out yourself!

The current version of Delpher has a Dutch interface only, but even without thorough knowledge of Dutch it’s probably not too hard to try out the new service. First activate the LexiconService in the settings screen: (“Zoeksuggesties tonen met historische spellingvarianten”). Then type your query in the advanced search fields (select “Uitgebreid zoeken”) and search for books, newspapers or periodicals.

Speaking the same language is one thing, understanding what the other is saying is another… – Carl Wilson at the Succeed technical workshop on the interoperability of digitisation platforms.

Interoperability is a term widely used to describe the ability of making systems and organisations work together (inter-operate). However, interoperability is not just about the technical requirements for information exchange. In a broader definition, it also includes social, political, and organisational factors that impact system to system performance and is related to questions of (commercial) power and market dominance (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability).

On 2 October 2014, the Succeed project organised a technical workshop on the interoperability of digitisation platforms at the National library of the Netherlands in The Hague. 19 researchers, librarians, and computer scientists from several European countries participated in the workshop (see SUCCEED Interoperability Workshop_Participants). In preparation of the workshop, the Succeed project team asked participants to fill out a questionnaire containing several questions on the topic of interoperability. The questionnaire was filled out by 12 participants; the results were presented during the workshop. The programme included a number of presentations and several interactive sessions to come to a shared view on what interoperability is about, what are the main issues and barriers to be dealt with, and how we should approach these.

The main goals of the workshop were:

1. Establishing a baseline for interoperability based on the questionnaire and presentations of the participants
2. Formulating a common statement on the value of interoperability
3. Defining the ideal situation with regard to interoperability
4. Identifying the most important barriers
5. Formulating an agenda

1. Baseline

Presentation by Carl Wilson

To establish a baseline (what is interoperability and what is its current status in relation to digitisation platforms), our programme included a number of presentations. We invited Carl Wilson of the Open Preservation Foundation (previously the Open Planets Foundation)  for the opening speech. He set the scene by sharing a number of historical examples (in IT and beyond) of interoperability issues. Carl made clear that interoperability in IT has many dimensions:

1. Technical dimensions
   Within the technical domain, two types of interoperability can be discerned, i.e.:
   Syntactical interoperability (aligning metadata formats); “speaking the same language”, and Semantical interoperability; “understanding each other
2. Organizational /Political dimensions
3. Legal (IPR) dimensions
4. Financial dimensions

When approaching operability issues, it might help to take into account these basic rules:

• Simplicity
• Standards
• Clarity
• Test early (automated testing, virtualisation)
• Test often

Finally, Carl stressed that the importance of interoperability will further increase with the rise of the Internet of Things, as it involves more frequent information exchange between more and more devices.

The Succeed Interoperability platform

After Carl Wilson’s introductory speech, Enrique Molla from the University of Alicante (UA is project leader of the Succeed project) presented the Succeed Interoperability framework, which allows users to test and combine a number of digitisation tools. The tools are made available as web services by a number of different providers, which allows the user to try them out online without having to install any of these tools locally. The Succeed project met with a number of interoperability related issues when developing the platform. For instance, the web services have a number of different suppliers; some of them are not maintaining their services. Moreover, the providers of the web services often have commercial interests, which means that they impose limits such as a maximum number of users of pages tested through the tools.

Presentations by participants

After the demonstration of the Succeed Interoperability platform, the floor was open for the other participants, many of whom had prepared a presentation about their own project and their experience with issues of interoperability.

Bert Lemmens presented the first results of the Preforma Pre-Commercial Procurement project (running January 2014 to December 2017). A survey performed by the project made clear that (technically) open formats are in many cases not the same as libre/ open source formats. Moreover, even when standard formats are used across different projects, they are often implemented in multiple ways. And finally, when a project or institution has found their technically appropriate format, they may often find that limited support is available on how to adopt the format.

Gustavo Candela Romero gave an overview of the services provided by the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (BVMC) The BVMC developed their service oriented architecture with the purpose of facilitating online access to Hispanic Culture. The BVMC offers their data as OAI-PMH, allowing other institutions or researchers to harvest their content. Moreover, the BVMC is working towards publishing their resources in RDF and making it available through a SPARQL Endpoint.

Alastair Dunning and Pavel Kats explained how Europeana and The European Library are working towards a shared storage system for aggregators with shared tools for the ingestion and mapping process. This will have practical and financial benefits, as shared tools will reduce workflow complexity, are easier to sustain and, finally, cheaper.

Clara Martínez Cantón presented the work of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (LINHD), the research centre on Digital Humanities at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Spain. The LINHD encourages researchers to make use of Linked Data. Clara showed the advantages of using Linked Data in a number of research projects related to metrical repertoires. In these projects, a number of interoperability issues (such as a variety of structures of the data, different systems used, and variation in the levels of access) were by-passed by making use of a Linked Data Model.

Marc Kemps-Snijders made clear how the Meertens Institute strives to make collections and technological advances available to the research community and the general public by providing technical support and developing applications. Moreover, the Meertens Institute is involved in a number of projects related to interoperability, such as Nederlab and CLARIN.

Menzo Windhouwer further elaborated on the projects deployed by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). CLARIN is a European collaborative effort to create, coordinate and make language resources and technology available and readily useable. CLARIN is involved in setting technical standards and creating recommendations for specific topics. CLARIN has initiated the Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI), which is an integrated semantic layer to
achieve semantic interoperability and overcome the differences between different metadata structures.

Presentation of responses to the Succeed questionnaire and overview of issues mentioned

To wrap up the first part of the programme, and to present an overview of the experiences and issues described by the participants, Rafael Carrasco from the University of Alicante presented the results of the Succeed online questionnaire (see also below).

Most institutions which filled out the questionnaire made clear that they are already addressing interoperability issues. They are mainly focusing on technical aspects, such as the normalization of resources or data and the creation of an interoperable architecture and interface. The motives for striving for interoperability were threefold: there is a clear demand by users; interoperability means an improved quality of service; and interoperability through cooperation with partner institutions brings many benefits to the institutions themselves. The most important benefits mentioned were: to create a single point of access (i.e., a better service to users), and to reduce the cost of software maintenance.

Tomasz Parkola and Sieta Neuerburg proceeded by recapturing the issues presented in the presentations. Clearly, all issues mentioned by participants could be placed in one of the dimensions introduced by Carl Wilson, i.e. Technical, Organizational/ Political, Financial, or Legal.

2. What is the value of interoperability?

Having established our baseline of the current status of interoperability, the afternoon programme of the workshop further included a number of interactive sessions, which were led by Irene Haslinger of the National library of the Netherlands. To start off, we asked the participants to write down their notion of the value of interoperability.

The following topics were brought up:

• Increased synergy
• More efficient/ effective allocation of resources
• Cost reduction
• Improved usability
• Improved data accessibility

3. How would you define the ideal situation with regard to interoperability?

After defining the value of interoperability, the participants were asked to describe their ‘ideal situation’.

The participants mainly mentioned their technical ideals, such as:

• Real time/ reliable access to data providers
• Incentives for data publishing for researchers
• Improved (meta)data quality
• Use of standards
• Ideal data model and/ or flexibility in data models
• Only one exchange protocol
• Automated transformation mechanism
• Unlimited computing capacity
• All tools are “plug and play” and as simple as possible
• Visualization analysis

Furthermore, a number of organizational ideals was brought up:

• The right skills reside in the right place/ with the right people
• Brokers (machines & humans) help to achieve interoperability

4. Identifying existing barriers

After describing the ‘ideal world’, we asked the participants to go back to reality and identify the most important barriers which – in their view – stop us from achieving the interoperability ideals described above.

In his presentation of the responses to the questionnaire, Rafael Carrasco had already identified the four issues considered to be the most important barriers for the implementation of interoperability:

• Insufficient expertise by users
• Insufficient documentation
• The need to maintain and/ or adapt third party software or webservices
• Cost of implementation

The following barriers were added by the participants:

Technical issues (in order of relevance)

• Pace of technological developments/ evolution
• Legacy systems
• Persistence; permanent access to data
• Stabilizing standards

Organizational/ Political issues (in order of relevance)

• Communication and knowledge management
• Lack of 21st century skills
• No willingness to share knowledge
• “Not invented here”-syndrome
• Establishment of trust
• Bridging the innovation gap; responsibility as well as robustness of tools
• Conflicts of interest between all stakeholders (e.g. different standards)
• Decision making/ prioritizing
• Current (EU) funding system hinders interoperability rather than helping it (funding should support interoperability between rather than within projects)

Financial issues (in order of relevance)

• Return of investment
• Resources
• Time
• Commercial interests often go against interoperability

Legal issues

• Issues related to Intellectual Property Rights

5. Formulate an agenda: Who should address these issues?

Having identified the most important issues and barriers, we concluded the workshop by an open discussion centering on the question: who should address these issues?

In the responses to the questionnaire, the participants had identified three main groups:

• Standardization bodies
• The research community
• Software developers

During the discussion, the participants added some more concrete examples;

• Centres of Competence established by the European Commission should facilitate standardization bodies by both influence the agenda (facilitate resources) and by helping institutions to find the right experts for the interoperability issues (and vice versa)
• Governmental institutions, including universities and other educational institutions, should strive to improve education in “21st century skills”, to improve users’ understanding of technical issues

At the end of our workshop, we concluded that, to achieve a real impact on the implementation of interoperability, there needs to be a demand from the side of the users, while the institutions and software developers need to be facilitated both organizationally and financially. Most probably, European centres of competence, such as Impact, have a role to play in this field. This is also most relevant in relation to the Succeed project. One of the project deliverables will be a Roadmap for funding Centres of Competence in work programmes. The role of Centres of Competences in relation to interoperability is one of the topics discussed in this document. As such, the results of the Succeed workshop on interoperability will be used as input for this roadmap.

We would like to thank all participants for their contribution during the workshop and look forward to working with you on interoperability issues in the future!

More pictures on Flickr

According to the National library of the Netherlands, libraries are positioned at the very core of the Semantic Web. In the words of Hans Jansen, Head of the library’s Innovation and Development department, “Linking data is the way forward for libraries. Any cultural heritage institution that does not invest in linking data will become obsolete.”

[vimeo 36752317 w=400 h=300]

Linked Open Data video by Europeana

The National library completed several successful Linked Data projects based on metadata linking. For example, for our newspaper app Here was the news (available in Dutch only), we added latitude and longitude data to our Dutch historical newspaper articles. The app allows users to search the newspaper collection by location. Moreover, the library has added links between its own journal collection and the TV and radio recordings of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. (This feature is not yet available on our website.)

While the work on linking our metadata continues, the library’s Research department is currently involved in an effort to link named entities in our full text collections. The purpose of this project is to contribute to a fully Linked Open Data-enabled library, entailing an enhanced user experience and improved discovery based on semantic relations. To further contribute to the progress of the semantic web, we will offer our full text enrichments as open data.

Linking named entities

To achieve our objectives, we need to be able to identify and link relevant named entities in our text collections. As part of the Europeana Newspapers project, we programmed a machine-learning tool to identify named entities in our full text collections. This software will allow us to extract all named entities from our full text collections and link them to related resources and resource descriptions. The software and documentation are available on GitHub.

The Research department created an enrichment database to collect information about the named entities and to store links to external resources. We are currently linking the named entities to DBpedia, while simultaneously storing links to related resource descriptions in Freebase and VIAF. This will be further extended to other resources, such as genealogy databases. Additionally, we will develop software for ‘socially enhanced linking’, i.e. tools allowing users to validate or reject links that were obtained automatically and to create new links for resources.

Challenges

Within the project, we still face some important challenges. A first problem is the issue of incomplete external coverage. Not all named entities are covered by resource description databases such as DBpedia and Freebase. Historical entities are especially neglected, and international databases such as DBpedia frequently omit even well-known Dutch figures. Moreover, there is no single global identifier for a resource. Resource description databases – such as DBpedia, Freebase and Geonames – all use their own identifiers, resulting in single resources leading to multiple resource descriptions.

Another issue that has to be dealt with is that of intellectual property rights. Ownership issues can hinder progress towards openness. Then there are problems of textual recognition difficulties. This is mostly related to OCR issues, but it also applies to historical language variations, name variants and other types of ambiguity. And finally, manual intervention is indispensable. We will need crowdsourcing to check, validate and correct links which have been automatically generated.

Expected results

The National library expects to achieve the most important results in two areas: first, enhanced discoverability and second, data enrichments. Both are essential to keep the library relevant in the digital age.

Linked Open Data is a powerful method to link digital heritage at a national or international level, especially because the data is openly available. Relations between resources transcend organisational, national and language barriers. The identification and linking of data helps to transform library collections into (machine and human readable) information and knowledge. This will allow for much richer search and discovery opportunities.

The National library’s Senior researcher Theo van Veen sees the future of Linked Open Data as “a single worldwide resource description database which will replace most or all bibliographic thesauri, with all resources mentioned in metadata or text linking to the same single identifier”.

For the National Library, being a collection holder, the Succeed awards ceremony was one of the highlights of the conference, because it showed the application of technology to actual collections. The Succeed awards aim to recognise successful digitisation programmes in the field of historical texts, especially those using the latest technology.

Two prizes went to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, while two Commendations of Merit were awarded to the London Metropolitan Archives/ University College London  and to Tecnilógica.

In her role of member of the IMPACT CoC executive board, the KB’s Head of Research, Hildelies Balk, took part in the ceremony and awarded the Commendation of Merit to the London Metropolitan Archives/ University College London for their Great Parchment Book project. You will find a short video about the project here.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDD2cVT7PeU]

Moreover, the KB hosted an interesting and fruitful Round table workshop on the future of research and funding in digitisation and the possible roles of Centres of Competence on 20 May. Some 30 librarians and researchers joined this workshop, and discussed the below topics:

• What research is needed to further the development of the Digital Library?
• How can Centres of Competence assist your research or development?
• In digitisation, are we ready to move the focus from quantity to quality?
• What enrichments, e.g. in Named Entity Recognition, Linked Data services, or crowdsourcing for OCR correction, would be most beneficial for digitisation?
• What’s your take on Labs and Virtual Research Environments?
• What would you like to do in these types of research settings?
• What do you expect to get out of them?

The preliminary outcomes of the workshop show that the main goal for institutions is to give users unrestricted access to data. During the workshop, the participants discussed the many layered aspects of these three topics, i.e. ‘users’, ‘access’, and ‘data’. Moreover, the participants gave their view on the following questions in relation to these topics:

• What stops us from making progress?
• What helps us to make progress?
• And what role could CoCs play in this?

The outcomes of the workshop have been documented and will be used as a starting point for the roadmap to further development of digitisation and the digital library, which will be produced within the Succeed project. This roadmap will serve to support the European Commission in preparing the 2014–2020 Work Programme for Research and Innovation.

Hildelies Balk in the National Library’s Reading Rooms

The Digitisation Days will be of interest to …?

‘Anyone who is working with digitised historical texts. These are often difficult to use because the software cannot decipher damaged originals or illegible characters. For example:

‘The software used to ‘read’ this (Dutch) text produces the following result:

VVt Venetien den 1.Junij, Anno 1618.
DJgn i f paffato te S’ aö’Jifeert mo?üen/bah
.)etgi’uotbciraetail)i.r/JtmelchontDecht
te / sbnbe bele btr felbrr geiufttceert baer bnber
eeniglje jprant o^fen/bie ftcb .met beSpaenfcbeu
enbeeemgljen bifet Cbeiiupcen berbonbru befe

‘The Dutch National Library and many other libraries are striving to make these types of historical text more usable to researchers by enhancing the quality of the OCR (optical character recognition). Since 2008, we have been involved in European projects set up to improve the usability of OCR’d texts – preferably automatically. The IMPACT Centre of Competence as well as the Digitisation Days are quite unique in that they bring together three interest groups:

• institutions with digitised collections (libraries, archives, museums)
• researchers working on means to improve access to digitised text (image recognition, pattern recognition, language technology)
• companies providing products and services in the field of digitisation and OCR.

‘Representatives of all of these groups will be taking part in the Digitisation Days and they offer participants a complete overview of the state of the art in document analysis, language technology and post-correction of OCR.’

What are the most important benefits from the Centre of Competence and the Digitisation Days, in your opinion?

‘The IMPACT Centre of Competence assists heritage institutions in taking important decisions. We evaluate available tools and report about them. Evaluation software of good quality is available as well. We also provide institutions with guidance and advice in digitisation issues by answering questions such as: what would be the best tools and methods for this particular institution? What quality can you expect from a solution? And what will it cost?’

‘The Digitisation Days offer a perfect opportunity for heritage institutions to get together and share experience and knowledge on issues such as: how to embed digitisation in your institution? How to deal with providers? Also: how do we start up new projects? Where do we find funding? On the second day, those who are interested are invited to join a workshop on the topic of the research agenda for digitisation. What should be the focus for the coming years? Should we focus on quantity or quality? How can we help shapeEuropean plans and budgets?’

Now that you mention Europe: IMPACT, IMPACT Centre of Competence, SUCCEED – the announcement of the Digitisation Days is packed with acronyms. Can you give us a bit of help here??

‘IMPACT was the first European research project aimed at improving access to historical texts. It started in 2008, at the initiative of, among others, the Dutch KB. When the project ended, a number of IMPACT partners set up the IMPACT Centre of Competence to ensure that the project results would be supported and developed. The Centre is not a project, but a standing organisation.’

‘Succeed is another European project, and, by definition, temporary. The objectives are in line with the IMPACT CoC, and the project involves some of the same partners. The aim is raise awareness about the results of European projects related to the digital library and to stimulate implementation. Before the CoC, it was not uncommon for prototypes to be left as they were after completion of a project. Thus the investments did not pay off.’

Will you really turn theory into practice?

‘Yes, most definitely! It is our prime focus for the conference. This is why we instituted the Succeed awards which will be handed out during the Digitisation Days; the Succeed awards recognise the best implementations of innovative technologies. The board has recently announced the winners.’

What do you personally look forward to most during the Digitisation Days?

‘To meeting everybody, to bringing together all these different parties. Colleagues from other institutions, researchers – this is exactly the right kind of meeting for generating exciting ideas and solutions.’

Hildelies Balk in de leeszalen van de KB

Voor wie zijn de Digitisation Days interessant?

‘Voor iedereen die te maken heeft met gedigitaliseerde, historische teksten. Die zijn vaak moeilijk bruikbaar omdat de leessoftware veel fouten maakt. Dat komt bij voorbeeld omdat het originele drukwerk zelf al slecht was, of omdat de drukletter slecht leesbaar is:

‘De software die de plaatjes moet omzetten in leesbare tekst maakt daarvan:

VVt Venetien den 1.Junij, Anno 1618.
DJgn i f paffato te S’ aö’Jifeert mo?üen/bah
.)etgi’uotbciraetail)i.r/JtmelchontDecht
te / sbnbe bele btr felbrr geiufttceert baer bnber
eeniglje jprant o^fen/bie ftcb .met beSpaenfcbeu
enbeeemgljen bifet Cbeiiupcen berbonbru befe

‘De KB en andere bibliotheken willen dit soort teksten in bruikbare vorm aanbieden aan wetenschappers. Dus zoeken we al sinds 2008 in Europees verband naar methoden om de teksten te verbeteren, liefst automatisch. Het unieke aan het IMPACT Centre of Competence én van de Digitisation Days is dat daar drie belangengroepen bij elkaar komen die elkaar versterken:

• instellingen met collecties die gedigitaliseerd zijn (bibliotheken, archieven, musea)
• onderzoekers die methoden ontwikkelen om gedigitaliseerde tekst te verbeteren (beeldherkenning en – verbetering, patroonherkenning, taaltechnologie)
• leveranciers van producten en diensten voor digitalisering en OCR (optical character recognition).

‘Door de aanwezigheid van al deze mensen krijgt de bezoeker in twee dagen tijd een compleet overzicht van wat er momenteel allemaal mogelijk is – op het gebied van documentanalyse, taaltechnologie en post-correctie van OCR.’

Wat zie jij als het grootste nut van het Centre of Competence en de Digitisation Days?

‘Het IMPACT Centre of Competence helpt erfgoedinstellingen belangrijke beslissingen te nemen. We evalueren bestaande tools en publiceren daarover. Er is zelfs heel goede evaluatiesoftware. En we leveren begeleiding; als een instelling wil gaan digitaliseren kunnen wij ze van advies dienen. Wat zijn de beste tools en methoden in hun specifieke geval? Wat voor kwaliteit mag je verwachten? Wat gaat het kosten?’

‘De Digitisation Days zijn een perfecte manier voor erfgoedinstellingen om elkaar te ontmoeten, uitgebreid ervaringen en kennis te delen. Bijvoorbeeld: Hoe ga je om met leveranciers? Hoe geef je digitalisering een plek in je organisatie? Maar ook: hoe zetten we nieuwe projecten op? Hoe vinden we geldstromen? Op de tweede dag is er een workshop waarin we met belangstellenden gaan praten over de onderzoeksagenda voor digitalisering. Waar moeten we de nadruk op leggen? Meer kwantiteit of meer kwaliteit? Hoe kunnen we de plannen en budgetten van Europa beïnvloeden?’

Nu je het over Europa hebt: IMPACT, IMPACT Centre of Competence, SUCCEED – de aankondiging van de Digitisation Days staat vol met afkortingen. Kun je een beetje orde scheppen in die chaos?

‘IMPACT was het eerste Europese onderzoeksproject voor verbetering van toegang tot historische teksten dat mede op initiatief van de KB in 2008 is gestart. Toen het project afgelopen was, hebben een aantal IMPACT-partners de handen ineengeslagen om ervoor te zorgen dat de resultaten van het project onderhouden en verder ontwikkeld zouden worden. Dat is het IMPACT Centre of Competence. Geen project, maar een staande organisatie.’

‘Succeed is weer een Europees project en dus tijdelijk. De doelstellingen liggen helemaal in lijn met het IMPACT CoC, en daarom zijn er deels dezelfde partners bij betrokken. Doel is om te zorgen dat eindresultaten van Europese projecten op het gebied van de digitale bibliotheek goed onder de aandacht worden gebracht zodat ze gebruikt gaan worden in de praktijk. In het verleden bleven prototypes nog wel eens op de plank liggen. Dat is zonde van de investering.’

Wordt de stap van theorie naar praktijk echt gezet?

‘Jazeker! Die willen we juist alle aandacht geven. Daarom reiken we tijdens de Digitisation Days de Succeed awards uit – prijzen voor de beste toepassingen van innovatieve oplossingen. De jury heeft onlangs de kandidaten en de winnaars bekend gemaakt.’

Waar verheug jijzelf je het meest op tijdens de Digitisation Days?

‘Op de ontmoeting, het bij elkaar brengen van al die belanghebbenden. Collega’s van andere instellingen, de onderzoekers – juist uit de ontmoeting komen vaak spannende ideeën en oplossingen voort.’