We would like to invite you to attend the IMPACT event “Project Outcomes” on 26 June 2012, which will take place at the KB National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. At this event, the IMPACT project outcomes will be presented by IMPACT staff, along with results of several pilots that have been conducted with some of the tools at IMPACT libraries in early 2012.
The IMPACT project (January 2008 – June 2012) is a European research project focused on innovating OCR software and language technology to improve the digitisation of historical printed text. IMPACT is led by the KB National Library of the Netherlands. Our group of partners includes several major European national libraries, universities, research centres and two private sector companies (ABBYY and IBM Haifa). IMPACT recently launched the IMPACT Centre of Competence (www.digitisation.eu), a productive network of experts in digitisation that will build on the research and development of partners from the IMPACT project and continue to improve access to text.

At the end of the project in June 2012, IMPACT is presenting the following results:

• The improved commercial OCR engine ABBYY FineReader 10 (the IMPACT FineReader)
• IBM’s Adaptive OCR engine with the CONCERT tool for OCR correction
• Computerlexica for 9 European languages and tools for lexicon building
• A digitisation framework for demonstrating and evaluating tools and results
• An invaluable dataset which can foster further research activities
• The Functional Extension Parser capable of decoding layout elements of books
• A postcorrection tool with text and error profiler
• Novel Approaches to preprocessing and OCR for future development
• The IMPACT Centre of Competence for digitisation