IBM, EU partner to digitalise historic European texts

To digitalise rare and culturally significant historical texts on a massive scale

IBM and the European Union (EU) have expanded their research collaboration by including more than two-dozen national libraries, research institutes, universities, and companies across Europe.

The objective of the collaboration is to provide new technology that will enable highly-accurate digitisation of rare and culturally significant historical texts on a massive scale.

The company said this collaboration, which is termed as IMPACT (IMProving ACcess to Text), will provide new tools and practices to institutions across Europe that will allow them efficiently and accurately continue to produce quality digital replicas of historically significant texts and make them available, editable and searchable online.

IMPACT technology will use new Web-enabled adaptive optical character recognition (OCR) software with 'crowd computing' technology, to allow institutions to adapt digitisation to the idiosyncrasies of old fonts, anomalies and vocabularies and reduce error rates by 35% and substitution rates by 75%.

According to IBM, IMPACT technology streamlines, simplifies and accelerates the process of winnowing out questionable text scans, enabling reviewers to key in corrections to the text.

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