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ABBYY Empowers Danish Royal Library's Digitisation Project

September 19, 2013
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Library improves access to historical texts through technology innovation

 

ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today announced the Danish Royal Library is currently using ABBYY Recognition Server to digitize their collections. ABBYY provides Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and expertise in recognizing historic fonts, which helps to transform Europe’s printed heritage into digitally available resources.

 

ABBYY offers products equipped with the most advanced text recognition technology for printed historic documents. ABBYY has a long experience in developing OCR software, particularly for libraries and universities in Europe that often have the added challenge of dealing with old texts and historic fonts, such as Fraktur and Gothic. Starting in 2008, ABBYY participated in the European Commission’s IMPACT project. The consortium brought together twenty-six European national and regional libraries, research institutions and technology partners to share knowledge and best practices, developing innovative tools to enhance the capabilities of OCR engines. ABBYY played a key role in the IMPACT project by providing state-of-the-art OCR technology and expertise for digitizing historic fonts and extracting text from old documents.

 

“For our work we needed OCR software with advanced features that could satisfactorily transform scanned pages into full text or XML, particularly when it came to old books, magazines and newspapers,” said Hamid Mehrabi at the Danish Royal Library. “We chose ABBYY Recognition Server for the cutting-edge OCR technology which enables us to process documents of often poor quality much more efficiently. And we know we can rely on this collaboration, as ABBYY is continuously working closely with libraries and the other partners to improve the core technology.”

 

“Digitization not only can help preserve European intellectual and cultural 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 Bodo Wagener, Vice President of Sales and Services at ABBYY Europe. “ABBYY is excited to contribute to this worthwhile goal at the Danish Royal Library and we appreciate the close and productive collaboration with people who are just as enthusiastic about text recognition as ourselves.”

 

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

About the Danish Royal Library

The Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark (Danish: Det Kongelige Bibliotek), is the national library of Denmark and the university library of the University of Copenhagen. It is the largest library in the Nordic countries.
It contains numerous historical treasures; all works that have been printed in Denmark since the 17th century are deposited there. Thanks to extensive donations in the past the library holds nearly all known Danish printed works back to the first Danish book, printed in 1482.

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