Final Project Conference Will See Launch of the IMPACT Centre of Competence

Bracknell, UK (13, October 2011) — ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, document capture and linguistic technologies and services, today announced its participation in the final conference of the European Commission’s Improving Access to Text (IMPACT) project. The event will take place on 24-25 October 2011, at the British Library in London. The IMPACT consortium, led by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek - National Library of the Netherlands, brings together twenty-six European project partners who range from national and regional libraries to research institutions and commercial suppliers who have pooled their knowledge and best practices.

Over the last few years mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the museum, library and archive world. A number of leading institutions in Europe including the British Library, the Bavarian State Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands, are undertaking large-scale digitisation projects, scanning millions of pages each year.

As Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-strategy and Information Systems at the British Library says, "digitisation has the potential to revolutionise research. The efficiency gains made possible by access to digital rather than physical items are huge. However, this is only the first step to making these documents accessible. Optical Character Recognition (OCR), indexing, text mining and sophisticated browser-based applications are also required to make this material easy to find, view, compare and analyse. The improvement in these techniques fostered by IMPACT has moved the boundaries of research forward by developing the tools that are required to unlock our physical collections and turn them into digital treasures."

Since 2008, ABBYY has played a key role in the IMPACT project by providing state-of-the-art OCR technology and expertise in recognising historic or old fonts. At this conference, the final tools and services of IMPACT will be presented, along with related research in the field of OCR and language technology. During the conference ABBYY representatives will be informing about the enhancements to the ABBYY recognition technology now available commercially for use by institutions and organisations around the world.

“Digitisation not only can help preserve European intellectual heritage for future generations, it can also unlock and make those treasures available for millions of researchers, students and regular readers around the globe,” explained Andrey Isaev, Director of the SDK Products Department at ABBYY. “ABBYY is excited to contribute to this worthwhile initiative with our OCR innovation and sharing of best practice. We also appreciate the close and productive collaboration with people who are just as enthusiastic about text recognition as ourselves.”

In addition the conference will see the launch of the IMPACT Centre of Competence, which aims to make digitisation of historical printed text in Europe better, faster, cheaper and provide the tools, services and mechanisms for further advancement in this field. The IMPACT Centre of Competence will bring together leading lights involved in all aspects of digitisation and give invaluable access to a network of experts, research and content institutions throughout the industry.

More information on the IMPACT project and the final conference can be found at http://www.impact-project.eu/.

For more information on ABBYY OCR technology for recognising historical texts visit http://www.frakturschrift.com.