Prof. dr. Huub Wijfjes (RUG/UvA) showing word clouds used in his research.

On 24 March, we opened up our auditorium to 10 research projects that use our digitised newspapers. The presenters came from many areas of DH research as we had historians, linguists, computer programmers, a linked data specialist, and media researchers. Next to this, we also asked colleagues to present what they are working on with regards to our newspapers. This resulted in presentations about copyright, digitisation (OCR and future plans), a Wikipedia project, the Research Lab and Europeana Newspapers. All in all we had three blocks of presentations spanning the whole day, and an auditorium filled with interested researchers, journalists, librarians, students and colleagues.

The original idea of the day was to provide a networking opportunity for those researchers who used our newspapers in their projects, but while organising it we noticed that not only those researchers were interested in hearing what others are doing, but that a wider group of people wanted to know what was possible with the data set. When we opened up the registration, we quickly outgrew the room we booked and had to transfer to the auditorium. Ultimately, we had 145 people who visited the symposium and who were responsible for lively discussions after the presentations and during the breaks.

Discussions in between presentations.

The varied audience and speakers of the day also meant having different levels of expertise in Digital Humanities and working with data, but this provided very valuable insights into working with the newspapers. The differences in skills between, for example, a historian and a programmer provides challenges when working together in research projects, but also provides a very valuable learning experience for both.

Working with new computational methods might be a bit scary for an inexperienced researcher, but can mean very interesting results, according to Dr. Martijn Kleppe (EUR). But how does a researcher know if these results are trustworthy? If the software actually does its job? Dr. Antske Fokkens (VU) explains that it is important to show researchers that they should be aware of what software can and cannot do and how you should interpret results. Another common technical issue that researchers came across is the lack of computational capacity. Humanities faculties often do not have the setup to process large amounts of data.

Dr. Antske Fokkens on the methods used at the Vrije Universiteit.

Next to these technical challenges, the material itself also provides problems when using it, such as OCR issues, lack of access due to the copyright, changes in the meaning of words and historical spelling and of course the ‘problem’ that we have not yet digitised every newspaper page in our collection. Working with this data and around these challenges is something that we can work together in. The KB works hard to improve the access to and usability of the newspapers and with the KB Research Lab, we can also provide support in the use of the data.

Martijn Kleppe listening to his colleague Laura Hollink

Because of this, many researchers have already used the newspapers in great research projects, such as Polimedia. Here, our newspapers are linked to the parliamentary papers and the radio bulletins, providing a search engine that shows how parliamentary debates are mentioned in the media. Or the Dutch Ships and Sailors-project where maritime data is linked together (and to our newspapers) to provide information about Dutch ships in the 18th and 19th century. Mentioning all success stories might result in a very long blog, but all presentations (in Dutch) are available via our website (scroll down for the URLs).

We were very happy with the whole symposium, the great speakers and the wonderful audience and we hope to be able to organise something similar in the future. If you are interested in our newspapers, other data sets, or our Research Lab, feel free to contact us!

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.

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.’

https://www.flickr.com/photos/116354723@N02/13757270124/

Is there any one still out there who thinks a hackathon is a malicious break-in? Far from it. It is the best way for developers and researchers to get together and work on new tools and innovations. The 2nd developers workshop / hackathon organised on 10-11 April by the Succeed Project was a case in point: bringing together people to work on new ideas and new inspiration for better OCR. The event was held in the “Claude Shannon” aula of the Department of Software and Computing Systems (DLSI) of the University of Alicante, Spain. Claude Shannon was a famous mathematician and engineer and is also known as the “father of information theory”. So it seems like a good place to have a hackathon!

Clemens explains what a hackathon is and what we hope to achieve with it for Succeed.

Same as last year, we again provided a wiki upfront with some information about possible topics to work on, as well as a number of tools and data that participants could experiment with before and during the event. Unfortunately there was an unexpectedly high number of no-shows this time – we try to keep these events free and open to everyone, but may have to think about charging at least a no-show fee in the future, as places are usually limited. Or did those hackers simply have to stay home to fix the heartbleed bug on their servers? We will probably never find out.

Collaboration, open source tools, open solutions

Nevertheless, there was a large enough group of programmers and researchers from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and various parts of Spain eager to immerse themselves deeply into a diverse list of topics. Already in the introduction we agreed to work on open tools and solutions, and quickly identified some areas in which open source tool support for text digitisation is still lacking (see below). Actually, one of the first things we did was to set up a local git repository, and people were pushing code samples, prototypes and interesting projects to share with the group during both days.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/116354723@N02/13775777003/

What’s the status of open source OCR?

Accordingly, Jesús Dominguez Muriel from Digibís (the company that also made http://www.digibis.com/dpla-europeana/)  started an investigation into open source OCR tools and frameworks. He made a really detailed analysis of the status of open source OCR, which you can find here. Thanks a lot for that summary, Jesús! At the end of his presentation, Jesús also suggested an “algorithm wikipedia” – I guess something similar to RosettaCode but then specifically for OCR. This would indeed be very useful to share algorithms but also implementations and prevent reinventing (or reimplementing) the wheel. Something for our new OCRpedia, perhaps?

A method for assessing OCR quality based on ngrams

As turned out on the second day, a very promising idea seemed to be using ngrams for assessing the quality of an OCR’ed text, without the need for ground truth. Well, in fact you do still need some correct text to create the ngram model, but one can use texts from e.g. Project Gutenberg or aspell for that. Two groups started to work on this: while Willem Jan Faber from the KB experimented with a simple Python script for that purpose, the group of Rafael Carrasco, Sebastian Kirch and Tomasz Parkola decided to implement this as a new feature in the Java ocrevalUAtion tool (check the work-in-progress “wip” branch).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/116354723@N02/13775774723/

Jesús in the front, Rafael, Sebastian and Tomasz discussing ngrams in the back.

Aligning text and segmentation results

Another very promising development was started by Antonio Corbi from the University of Alicante. He worked on a software to align plain text and segmentation results. The idea is to first identify all the lines in a document, segment them into words and eventually individual charcaters, and then align the character outlines with the text in the ground truth. This would allow (among other things) creating a large corpus of training material for an OCR classifier based on the more than 50,000 images with ground truth produced in the IMPACT Project, for which correct text is available, but segmentation could only be done on the level of regions. Another great feature of Antonio’s tool is that while he uses D as a programming language, he also makes use of GTK, which has the nice effect that his tool does not only work on the desktop, but also as a web application in a browser.

OCR is complicated, but don’t worry – we’re on it!

Gustavo Candela works for the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the largest Digital Library in the Spanish speaking world. Usually he is busy with Linked Data and things like FRBR, so he was happy to expand his knowledge and learn about the various processes involved in OCR and what tools and standards are commonly used. His findings: there is a lot more complexity involved in OCR than appears at first sight. And again, for some problems it would be good to have more open source tool support.

In fact, at the same time as the hackathon, at the KB in The Hague, the ‘Mining Digital Repositories‘ conference was going on where the problem of bad OCR was discussed from a scholarly perspective. And also there, the need for more open technologies and methods was apparent:

[tweet 454528200572682241 hide_thread=’true’]

Open source border detection

One of the many technologies for text digitisation that are available in the IMPACT Centre of Competence for image pre-processing is Border Removal. This technique is typically applied to remove black borders in a digital image that have been captured while scanning a document. The borders don’t contain any information, yet they take up expensive storage space, so removing the borders without removing any other relevant information from a scanned document page is a desirable thing to do. However, there is no simple open source tool or implementation for doing that at the moment. So Daniel Torregrosa from the University of Alicante started to research the topic. After some quick experiments with tools like imagemagick and unpaper, he eventually decided to work on his own algorithm. You can find the source here. Besides, he probably earns the award for the best slide in a presentation…showing us two black pixels on a white background!

A great venue

All in all, I think we can really be quite happy with these results. And indeed the University of Alicante also did a great job hosting us – there was an excellent internet connection available via cable and wifi, plenty of space and tables to discuss in groups and we were distant enough from the classrooms not to be disturbed by the students or vice versa. Also at any time there was excellent and light Spanish food – Gazpacho, Couscous with vegetables, assorted Montaditos, fresh fruit…nowadays you won’t make hackers happy with just pizza anymore! Of course there were also ice-cooled drinks and hot coffee, and rumours spread that there were also some (alcohol-free?) beers in the cooler, but (un)fortunately there is no more documentary evidence of that…

To be continued!

If you want to try out any of the software yourself, just visit our github and have go! Make sure to also take a look at the videos that were made with participants Jesús, Sebastian and Tomasz, explaining their intentions and expectations for the hackathon. And at the next hackathon, maybe we can welcome you too amongst the participants?

Hans-Jorg Lieder of the Berlin State Library (front left) is given an especially warm welcome by conference chair Toine Pieters (Utrecht), ‘because he was the only guy in Germany who would share his data with us in the Biland project.’

Libraries and researchers: a changing relationship

‘A lot has changed in recent years,’ Arjan van Hessen of the University of Twente and the CLARIN project told me. ‘Ten years ago someone might have suggested that perhaps we should talk to the KB. Now we are practically in bed together.’

But each relationship has its difficult moments. Researchers are not happy when they discover gaps in the data on offer, such as missing issues or volumes of newspapers. Or incomprehensible transcriptions of texts because of inadequate OCR (optical character recognition). Conference organisers Toine Pieters and Jaap Verheul (University of Utrecht) invited Hans-Jorg Lieder of the Berlin State Library to explain why he ‘could not give researchers everything everywhere today’.

Lieder & Thomas: ‘Digitising newspapers is difficult’

Both Deborah Thomas of the Library of Congress and Hans-Jorg Lieder stressed how complicated it is to digitise historical newspapers. ‘OCR does not recognise the layout in columns, or the “continued on page 5”. Plus the originals are often in a bad state – brittle and sometimes torn paper, or they are bound in such a way that text is lost in the middle. And there are all these different fonts, e.g., Gothic script in German, and the well-known long-s/f confusion.’ Lieder provided the ultimate proof of how difficult digitising newspapers is: ‘Google only digitises books, they don’t touch newspapers.’

Thomas: ‘The stuff we are digitising is often damaged’

Another thing researchers should be aware of: ‘Texts are liquid things. Libraries enrich and annotate texts, versions may differ.’ Libraries do their best to connect and cluster collections of newspapers (e.g., in the Europeana Newspapers), but ‘the truth of the matter is that most newspapers collections are still analogue; at this moment we have only bits and pieces in digital form, and there is a lot of bad OCR.’ There is no question that libraries are working on improving the situation, but funding is always a problem. And the choices to be made with bad OCR are sometimes difficult: Should we manually correct it all, or maybe retype it, or maybe even wait a couple of years for OCR technology to improve?’

Librarians and researchers discuss what is possible and what not. From the left, Steven Claeyssens, KB Data Services, Arjan van Hessen, CLARIN, and Tom Kenter, Translantis.

Researchers: how to mine for meaning

Researchers themselves are debating how they can fit these new digital resources into their academic work. Obviously, being able to search millions of newspaper pages from different countries in a matter of days opens up a lot of new research possibilities. Conference organisers Toine Pieters and Jaap Verheul (University of Utrecht) are both involved in the HERA Translantis project which is taking a break from traditional ‘national’ historical research by looking at transnational influences of so-called ‘reference cultures’:

Definition of Reference Cultures in the Translantis project which mines digital newspaper collections

In the 17th century the Dutch Republic was such a reference culture. In the 20th century the United States developed into a reference culture and Translantis digs deep into the digital newspaper archives of the Netherlands, the UK, Belgium and Germany to try and find out how the United States is depicted in public discourse:

Jaap Verheul (Translantis) shows how the US is depicted in Dutch newspapers

Joris van Eijnatten introduced another transnational HERA project, ASYMENC, which is exploring cultural aspects of European identity with digital humanities methodologies.

All of this sounds straightforward enough, but researchers themselves have yet to develop a scholarly culture around the new resources:

• What type of research questions do the digital collections allow? Are these new questions or just old questions to be researched in a new way?
• What is scientific ‘proof’ if the collections you mine have big gaps and faulty OCR?
• How to interpret the findings? You can search words and combinations of words in digital repositories, but how can you assess what the words mean? Meanings change over time. Also: how can you distinguish between irony and seriousness?
• How do you know that a repository is trustworthy?
• How to deal with language barriers in transnational research? Mere translations of concepts do not reflect the sentiment behind the words.
• How can we analyse what newspapers do not discuss (also known as the ‘Voldemort’ phenomenon)?
• How sustainable is digital content? Long-term storage of digital objects is uncertain and expensive. (Microfilms are much easier to keep, but then again, they do not allow for text mining …)
• How do available tools influence research questions?
• Researchers need a better understanding of text mining per se.

Some humanities scholars have yet to be convinced of the need to go digital

Rens Bod, Director of the Dutch Centre for Digital Humanities enthusiastically presented his ideas about the value of parsing (analysing parts of speech) for uncovering deep patterns in digital repositories. If you want to know more: Bod recently published a book about it.

Professor Rens Bod: ‘At the University of Amsterdam we offer a free course in working with digital data.’

But in the context of this blog, his remarks about the lack of big data awareness and competencies among many humanities scholars, including young students, was perhaps more striking. The University of Amsterdam offers a crash course in working with digital data to bridge the gap. The one-week, free course, deals with all aspects of working with data, from ‘gathering data’ to ‘cooking data’.

As the scholarly dimensions of working with big data are not this blogger’s expertise, I will not delve into these further but gladly refer you to an article Toine Pieters and Jaap Verheul are writing about the scholarly outcomes of the conference [I will insert a link when it becomes available].

Conference hosts Jaap Verheul (left) and Toine Pieters taking analogue notes for their article on Mining Digital Repositories. And just in case you wonder: the meeting rooms are probably the last rooms in the KB to be migrated to Windows 7

More data providers: the ‘bad’ guys in the room

It was the commercial data providers in the room themselves that spoke of ‘bad guys’ or ‘bogey man’ – an image both Ray Abruzzi of Cengage Learning/Gale and Elaine Collins of DC Thomson Family History were hoping to at least soften a bit. Both companies provide huge quantities of digitised material. And, yes, they are in it for the money, which would account for their bogeyman image. But, they both stressed, everybody benefits from their efforts:

Value proposition of DC Thomson Family History

Cengage Learning is putting 25-30 million pages online annually. Thomson is digitising 750 million (!) newspaper & periodical pages for the British Library. Collins: ‘We take the risk, we do all the work, in exchange for certain rights.’ If you want to access the archive, you have to pay.

In and of itself, this is quite understandable. Public funding just doesn’t cut it when you are talking billions of pages. Both the KB’s Hans Jansen and Rens Bod (U. of Amsterdam) stressed the need for public/private partnerships in digitisation projects.

And yet.

Elaine Collins readily admitted that researchers ‘are not our most lucrative stakeholders’; that most of Thomson’s revenue comes from genealogists and the general public. So why not give digital humanities scholars free access to their resources for research purposes, if need be under the strictest conditions that the information does not go anywhere else? Both Abruzzi and Collins admitted that such restricted access is difficult to organise. ‘And once the data are out there, our entire investment is gone.’

Libraries to mediate access?

Perhaps, Ray Abruzzi allowed, access to certain types of data, e.g., metadata, could be allowed under certain conditions, but, he stressed, individual scholars who apply to Cengage for access do not stand a chance. Their requests for data are far too varied for Cengage to have any kind of business proposition. And there is the trust issue. Abruzzi recommended that researchers turn to libraries to mediate access to certain content. If libraries give certain guarantees, then perhaps …

You think OCR is difficult to read? Try human handwriting!

What do researchers want from libraries?

More data, of course, including more contemporary data (… ah, but copyright …)

And better quality OCR, please.

What if libraries have to choose between quality and quantity?  That is when things get tricky, because the answer would depend on the researcher you question. Some may choose quantity, others quality.

Should libraries build tools for analysing content? The researchers in the room seemed to agree that libraries should concentrate on data rather than tools. Tools are very temporary, and researchers often need to build the tools around their specific research questions.

But it would be nice if libraries started allowing users to upload enrichments to the content, such as better OCR transcriptions and/or metadata.

Researchers and libraries discussing what is desirable and what is possible. In the front row, from the left, Irene Haslinger (KB), Julia Noordegraaf (U. of Amsterdam), Toine Pieters (Utrecht), Hans Jansen (KB); further down the front row James Baker (British Library) and Ulrich Tiedau (UCL). Behind the table Jaap Verheul (Utrecht) and Deborah Thomas (Library of Congress).

And there is one more urgent request: that libraries become more transparent in what is in their collections and what is not. And be more open about the quality of the OCR in the collections. Take, e.g., the new Dutch national search service Delpher. A great project, but scholars must know exactly what’s in it and what’s not for their findings to have any meaning. And for scientific validity they must be able to reconstruct such information in retrospect. So a full historical overview of what is being added at what time would be a valuable addition to Delpher. (I shall personally communicate this request to the Delpher people, who are, I may add, working very hard to implement user requests).

Deborah Thomas of the US Library of Congress: ‘This digital age is a bit like the American Wild West. It is a frontier with lots of opportunities and hopes for striking it rich. And maybe it is a bit unruly.’

New to the library: labs for researchers

Deborah Thomas of the Library of Congress made no bones about her organisation’s strategy towards researchers: We put out the content, and you do with it whatever you want. In addition to API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces), the Library is also allowing for downloads of bulk content. The basic content is available free of charge, but additional metadata levels may come at a price.

The British Library (BL) is taking a more active approach. The BL’s James Baker explained how the BL is trying to bridge the gap between researchers and content by providing special labs for researchers. As I (unfortunately!) missed that parallel session, let me mention the KB’s own efforts to set up a KB lab where researchers are invited to experiment with KB data making use of open source tools. The lab is still in its ‘pre-beta phase’ as Hildelies Balk of the KB explained. If you want the full story, by all means attend the Digital Humanities Benelux Conference in the Hague on 12-13 June, where Steven Claeyssens and Clemens Neudecker of the KB are scheduled to launch the beta-version of the platform. Here is a sneak preview of the lab, a scansion machine built by KB Data Services in collaboration with phonologist Marc van Oostendorp (audio in Dutch):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcTufco9P3A

Europeana: the aggregator

“Portals are for visiting; platforms are for building on.”

Another effort by libraries to facilitate transnational research is the aggregation of their content in Europeana, especially Europeana Newspapers. For the time being the metadata are being aggregated, but in Alistair Dunning‘s vision, Europeana will grow from an end-user portal into a data brain, a cloud platform that will include the content and allow for metadata enrichment:

Alistair Dunning: ‘Europeana must grow into a data brain to bring disparate data sets together.’

Dunning’s vision of Europeana 3.0

Dunning also indicated that Europeana might develop brokerage services to clear content for non-commercial purposes. In a recent interview Toine Pieters said that researchers would welcome Europeana to take such a role, ‘because individual researchers should not be bothered with all these access/copyright issues.’ In the United States, the Library of Congress is not contemplating a move in that direction, Deborah Thomas told her audience. ‘It is not our mission to negotiate with publishers.’ And recent ‘Mickey Mouse’ legislation, said to have been inspired by Disney interests, seems to be leading to less rather than more access.

Dreaming of digital utopias

What would a digital utopia look like for the conference attendees? Jaap Verheul invited his guests to dream of what they would do if they were granted, say, €100 million to spend as they pleased.

Deborah Thomas of the Library of Congress would put her money into partnerships with commercial companies to digitise more material, especially the post-1922 stuff (less restrictive copyright laws being part and parcel of the dream). And she would build facilities for uploading enrichments to the data.

James Baker of the British Library would put his money into the labs for researchers.

Researcher Julia Noordegraaf of the University of Amsterdam (heritage and digital culture) would rather put the money towards improving OCR quality.

Joris van Eijnatten’s dream took the Europeana plans a few steps further. His dream would be of a ‘Globiana 5.0’ – a worldwide, transnational repository filled with material in standardised formats, connected to bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and researched by a network of multilingual, big data-savvy researchers. In this context, he suggested that ‘Google-like companies might not be such a bad thing’ in terms of sustainability and standardisation.

Joris van Eijnatten: ‘Perhaps – and this is a personal observation – Google-like companies are not such a bad thing after all in terms of sustainability and standardisation of formats.’

At the end of the two-day workshop, perhaps not all of the ambitious agenda had been covered. But, then again, nobody had expected that.

Mining Digital Repositories 2014 – the ambitious agenda

The trick is for providers and researchers to keep talking and conquer this ‘unruly’ Wild West of digital humanities bit by bit, step by step.

And, by all means, allow researchers to ‘tinker’ with the data. Verheul: ‘There is a certain serendipity in working with big data that allows for playfulness.’

See also:

• Workshop programme and most slides are available at http://translantis.nl/, tab Conferences, Mining digital repositories (there does not seem to be a more specific link to the proper page).
• James Baker’s (British Library) miniblog
• Twitter hash tag #digrep14
• Arjan van Hessen’s blog at CLARIN
• A recent interview with Toine Pieters at the Europeana Newspapers site

The KB National Library of the Netherlands has been investigating named entity recognition (NER) and linked data technologies for a while now in projects such as IMPACT and STITCH+, and we felt it was about time to approach this on a production scale. So we decided to produce (open source) software, trained models as well as raw training data for NER software applications specifically for digitised historical newspapers as part of the project.

What is named entity recognition (NER)?

Named entity recognition is the process of identifying and classifying entities such as persons, locations and organisations in the full-text in order to enhance searchability. There are basically two types of approaches, a statistical and a rule based one. Rule based systems rely mostly on grammar rules defined by linguists, while statistical systems require large amounts of manually produced training data that they can learn from. While both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks, we decided to go for a statistical tool, the CRF–NER system from Stanford University. In comparison, this software proved to be the most reliable, and it is supported by an active user community. Stanford University has an online demo where you can try it out: http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/ner/.

Example of Wikipedia article for Albert Einstein, tagged with the Stanford NER tool

Requirements & challenges

There are some particular requirements and challenges when applying these techniques to digital historical newspapers. Since full-text for more than 10 million pages will be produced in the project, one requirement for our NER tool was that it should be able to process large amounts of texts in a rather short time. This is possible with the Stanford tool,  which as of version 1.2.8 is “thread-safe”, i.e. it can run in parallel on a multi-core machine. Another requirement was to preserve the information about where on a page a named entity has been detected – based on coordinates. This is particularly important for newspapers: instead of having to go through all the articles on a newspaper page to find the named entity, it can be highlighted so that one can easily spot it even on very dense pages.

Then there are also challenges of course – mainly due to the quality of the OCR and the historical spelling that is found in many of these old newspapers. In the course of 2014 we will thus collaborate with the Dutch Institute for Lexicology (INL), who have produced modules which can be used in a pre-processing step before the Stanford system and that can to some extent mitigate problems caused by low quality of the full-text or the appearance of historical spelling variants.

The Europeana Newspapers NER workflow

For Europeana Newspapers, we decided to focus on three languages: Dutch, French and German. The content in these three languages makes up for about half of the newspaper pages that will become available through Europeana Newspapers. For the French materials, we cooperate with LIP6-ACASA, for Dutch again with INL. The workflow goes like this:

1. We receive OCR results in ALTO format (or METS/MPEG21-DIDL containers)
2. We process the OCR with our NER software to derive a pre-tagged corpus
3. We upload the pre-tagged corpus into an online Attestation Tool (provided by INL)
4. Within the Attestation Tool, the libraries make corrections and add tags until we arrive at a “gold corpus”, i.e. all named entities on the pages have been manually marked
5. We train our NER software based on the gold corpus derived in step (4)
6. We process the OCR again with our NER software trained on the gold corpus
7. We repeat steps (2) – (6) until the results of the tagging won’t improve any further
   

   Screenshot of the NER Attestation Tool

Preliminary results

Named entity recognition is typically evaluated by means of Precision/Recall and F-measure. Precision gives an account of how many of the named entities that the software found are in fact named entities of the correct type, while Recall states how many of the total amount of named entities present have been detected by the software. The F-measure then combines both scores into a weighted average between 0 – 1. Here are our (preliminary) results for Dutch so far:

These figures have been derived from a k-fold cross-evaluation of 25 out of 100 manually tagged pages of Dutch newspapers from the KB. The results confirm the fact that the Stanford system tends to be a bit “conservative”, i.e. it has a somewhat lower recall for the benefit of higher precision, which is also what we wanted.

Conclusion and outlook

Within this final year of the project we are looking forward to see in how far we can still boost these figures by adopting the extra modules from INL, and what results we can achieve on the French and German newspapers. We will also investigate software for linking the named entities to additional online resource descriptions and authority files such as DBPedia or VIAF to create Linked Data. The crucial question will be how well we can disambiguate the named entities and find a correct match in these resources. Besides, if there is time, we would also want to experiment with NER in other languages, such as Serbian or Latvian. And, if all goes well, you might already hear more about this at the upcoming IFLA newspapers conference “Digital transformation and the changing role of news media in the 21st Century“.

References

• Get the source code of the NER tool for Europeana Newspapers: https://github.com/KBNLresearch/europeananp-ner/
• Get models and training data for the NER tool for Europeana Newspapers:
  http://lab.kbresearch.nl/static/html/eunews.html
• The Stanford University NER tool:
  http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
• The INL NER tool:
  http://www.digitisation.eu/tools/browse/toolbox-for-lexicon-building/named-entities-recognition-tool-nert/

This year in November, it has been exactly 10 years that I have been more or less involved with digital libraries and OCR. In fact, my first encounter with OCR even predates the digital library: during my student days, one of my fellow students was blind, and I was helping him out with his studies by scanning and OCR-ing the papers he needed, so their contents could be read out to him using Text2Speech software or printed on a braille display. Looking back, OCR technology has evolved significantly in many areas since then. Projects like MetaE and IMPACT have greatly improved the capabilities of OCR technology to recognize historical fonts, and open source tools such as Google’s Tesseract or those offered by the IMPACT Centre of Competence are getting closer and closer to the functionalities and success rates offered by commercial products.

Accordingly, I would like to take this opportunity to present you some thoughts and recommendations that I’ve derived from my personal experience of 10+ years with OCR processing.

A final caveat: while this is a very interesting discussion, I will not say a single word here about whether to perform OCR as an in-house activity or via out-sourcing. My general assumption is that below considerations can provide useful information for both scenarios.

1.    Know your material

The more you know about the material / collection you are aiming to OCR, the better. Some characteristics are essential for the configuration of the OCR, like e.g. the language of a document and the fonts (Antiqua, Gothic, Cyrillic, etc.) present. While such information is typically not available in library catalogues, sending documents in French language to an OCR engine configured to recognize English will yield equally poor results as trying to OCR a Gothic typeface with Antiqua settings.

Fortunately there are some helpful tools available – e.g. Apache Tika can detect the language of a document quite reliably. You may consider running such or similar characterization software in a pre-processing step to gather additional information about the content for a more fine-grained configuration of the OCR software.

Some more features in the running text the presence and frequency of which could influence your OCR setup are: tables and illustrations, paragraphs with rotated text, handwritten annotations, foldouts.

2.    Capture high quality – INPUT

Once you are ready to proceed to the image capture step it is important to think about how to set this up. While recent experiments have shown that (on simple documents) there is no apparent loss in recognition quality from using e.g. compressed JPEG images for OCR, my recommendation still remains to scan with the highest optical resolution (typically 300 or 400 ppi) and store the result in an uncompressed format like TIFF or PNG (or even the RAW data directly from the scanner).

While this may result in huge files and storage costs (btw, did you know that the cost per GB of hard drive space drop by 48% every year?), keep in mind that any form of post-processing or compression does essentially reduce the amount of information available in the image for subsequent processing – and it turns out that OCR engines are becoming more and more sophisticated in using this information (e.g. colour) to improve recognition. However, once gone, this information can never be retrieved again without rescanning. If you binarize (=convert to black-and-white) your images immediately after scanning, you won’t be able to leverage the benefits of the next-generation OCR system that requires greyscale or colour documents.

It may also be worthwhile mentioning that while this has never been made very explicit, the classifiers in many OCR engines are optimized for an optical resolution of 300 ppi, and deliver the best recognition rates with documents in that particular resolution. Only in the case of very small characters (as e.g. found on large newspaper pages) can it make sense to scale the image up to 600 ppi for better OCR results.

3.    Capture high quality – OUTPUT

OCR is still a costly process – from preparation to execution, costs can easily amount to between .5 up to .50 € per page. Thus you want to make sure that you derive the most possible value from it. Don’t be satisfied with plain text only! Nowadays some form of XML with (at least) basic structuring and most importantly positional information on the level of blocks / regions, or even better line and word or sometimes even glyph level, should always be available after OCR. ALTO is one commonly used standard for representing such information in an XML format, but also TEI or other XML-based formats can be a good choice.

Not only does the coordinate information enable greatly enhanced search and display of search results (hit term highlighting), there are also many further application scenarios such as the automated generation of table of contents, the production of eBooks, the presentation on mobile devices etc. that rely heavily on structural and layout information being available from OCR processing.

4.    Manage expectations

No matter how modern and in pristine condition your documents are, or whether you use the most advanced scanning equipment and highly configured OCR software, it is quite unrealistic to expect anything more than 90 – 95 % word accuracy from automatic processing. Most of the times though you will be happy to even come anywhere near that range.

Note that most commercial OCR engines calculate error rates based on characters and not words. This can be very misleading, since users will want to search for words. Given there are only 30 errors across a single page with 3000 characters, the character error rate (30/3000, 0,01%) seems exceptionally low. But now assume the 3000 characters boil down to only around 600 words – and the 30 erroneous characters are well distributed across different words. We arrive at an actually much higher (5x) error rate (30/600, 0,05%). To make things worse, OCR engines typically report a “confidence score” in the output. This however only means that the software believes with a certain threshold to have recognized a character or word correctly or incorrectly. These “assumptions”, despite conservative, are unfortunately often found not to be true. That is why the only possible way to derive absolutely reliable OCR accuracy scores is by the use of ground truth-driven evaluation, which is expensive and cumbersome to perform.

Obviously all of this has implications on the quality of any service based on the OCR result. These issues must be made transparent to the organization, and should in all cases also be communicated to the end user.

5.    Exploit full text to the fullest

Once you derive full text from OCR processing, it can be the first stepping stone for a wide array of further enhancements of your digital collection. Life does not stop with (even good) OCR results!

Full text gives you the ability to exploit a multitude of tools for natural language processing (NLP) on the content. Named entity recognition, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction etc. are just a few of the possibilities to further refine and enrich the full text.

6.    Tailor the workflow

The enemy of large-scale automated processing, it can nevertheless often be worthwhile investing some more time and tailor the OCR processing flow to the characteristics of the source material. There are highly specialized modules and engines for particular pre- and post-processing tasks, and integrating these with your workflow for a very particular subset of a collection can often yield surprising improvements in the quality of the result.

7.    Use all available resources

One of the important findings of the IMPACT project was that the use of additional language technologies can boost OCR recognition by an amount than cannot realistically be expected from even major breakthroughs in pattern recognition algorithms. Especially in dealing with historical material there is a lot of spelling variation, and it gets extremely difficult for the OCR software to correctly detect these old words. Making the OCR software aware of historical spelling by supplying it with a historical dictionary or word list can deliver dramatic improvements here. In addition, new technologies can detect valid historical spelling variants and distinguish them from common OCR errors. This makes it much quicker and easier to correct those OCR mistakes while retaining the proper historical word forms (i.e. no normalization is applied).

8.    Try out different solutions

There is a surprisingly large number of OCR software available, both freely and commercially. The Succeed project compiled information about all OCR and related software tools in a huge database that you can search here.

Also quite useful in this are the IMPACT Framework and Demonstrator Platform – these tools allow you to test different solutions for OCR and related tasks online, or even combine distinct tools into comprehensive document recognition workflows and compare those using samples of the material you have to process.

9.    Consult experts

All over the world people are applying, researching and sometimes re-inventing OCR technology. The IMPACT Centre of Competence provides a great entry point to that community. eMOP is another large OCR project currently run in the US. Consult with the community to find out about others who may have done projects similar to yours in the past and who can share findings or even technology.

Finally, consider visiting one of the main conferences in the field, such as ICDAR or ICPR and look at the relevant journal publications by IAPR etc. There is also a large community of OCR and pattern recognition experts in the Biosciences, e.g. in iDigBio. Hackathons like for example the ones organized by Succeed can provide you with hands-on experience with the tools and technologies being available for OCR.

10.    Consider post-correction

When all other things fail and you just can’t obtain the desired accuracy using automated processing methods, post-correction is often the only possible way to increase the quality of the text to a level suitable for scientific study and text mining. There are many solutions offered to adopt OCR post-correction, from simple-to-use crowdsourcing efforts to rather specialized tools for experts. Gamification of OCR correction has also been explored by some. And as a side effect you may also learn to interact more closely with your users and understand their needs.

With this I hope to have given you some points to take into consideration when planning your next OCR project and wish you much success in doing so. If you would like to comment on any of the points mentioned or maybe share your personal experience with an OCR project, we would be very happy to hear from you!

Hans-Jorg Lieder of the Berlin State Library presents the Europeana Newspapers Project at our September 2013 workshop in Amsterdam.

In June, the project had a workshop on refinement, but it was now time to discuss aggregation and presentation. This workshop took place in Amsterdam on 16 September, during The European Library Annual Event. There was a good group of people, not only from the project partners and the associated partners, but also from outside the consortium. After the project, TEL hopes to be able to also offer these institutions a chance to send in their newspapers for Europeana, so we were very happy to have them join us.

The workshop kicked off with an introduction from Marieke Willems of LIBER and Hans-Joerg Lieder of the Berlin State Library.. They were followed by Markus Muhr from TEL, who introduced the aggregation plan and the schedule for the project partners. With so many partners, it can be quite difficult to find a schedule that works well, to ensure everyone has their material sent in on time. After the aggregation, TEL will then have to do some work on the metadata to convert it to the Europeana Data Model. Markus was followed by a presentation from Channa Veldhuijsen from the KB, who unfortunately, could not be there in person. However, her elaborate presentation on usability testing provided some good insights on how to get your website to be the best it can be and how to find out what your users really think when they are browsing your site.

[slideshare id=26336264&style=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;&sc=no]

It was then time for Alastair Dunning from TEL to showcase the portal that they have been preparing for Europeana Newspapers. Unfortunately, the wifi connection was not up to so many visitors and only some people could follow his presentation along on their own devices. However, there were some valuable feedback points which TEL will use to improve the portal. Unfortunately, the portal is not yet available from outside, so people who missed the presentation need to wait a bit longer to be able to see and browse the European newspapers.

But what we do already can see, are some websites of partners that have already been online for some time. It was very interesting to see the different choices each partner made to showcase their collection. We heard from people from the British Library, the National and University Library of Iceland, the National and University Library of Slovenia, the National Library of Luxembourg and the National Library of the Czech Republic.

Yves Mauer from the National Library of Luxembourg presenting their newspaper portal

The day ended with a lovely presentation by Dean Birkett of Europeana, who, partly with Channa’s notes, went to all the previously presented websites and offered comments on how to improve them. The videos he used in his talk are available on Youtube. His key points were:

1. Make the type size large: 16px is the recommended size.
2. Be careful of colours. Some online newspapers sites use red to highlight important information but red is normally associated with warning signals and errors in the user’s mind.
3. Use words to indicate language choices (eg. ‘english’, ‘français’) not flags. The Spanish flag won’t necessarily be interpreted to mean ‘click here for spanish’ if the user is from Mexico.
4. Cut down on unnecessary text. Make it easy for users to skim (eg. though the use of bullet points).

All in all, it was a very useful afternoon in which I learned a lot about what users want from a website. If you want to see more, all presentations can be found at the Slideshare account of Europeana Newspapers or join us at one of the following events:

• Workshop on Newspapers in Europe and the Digital Agenda. British Library, London. September 29-30th, 2014.
• National Information Days.
  • National Library of Austria. March 25-26th, 2014.
  • National Library of France. April 3rd, 2014.
  • British Library. June 9th, 2014.