The document discusses the IMPACT project, which is developing collaborative workflows for digitizing historical books and newspapers printed before 1900. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands and involves 26 partner libraries and research institutes. It aims to create a workflow development platform that allows technical staff to provide tools for library staff to design digitization workflows through a community-driven process. The platform will incorporate modular, transparent, flexible, and extensible architectural principles.

1. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Experimental workflow development
in digitisation
The concept of collaborative workflow development in the IMPACT project
Mustafa Dogan (Göttingen State and University Library)
Clemens Neudecker (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
Gerd Zechmeister (Austrian National Library)
Sven Schlarb (Austrian National Library)

2. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Agenda
 Background of IMPACT
 Digitisation workflows
 Collaborative workflow development
 Architectural principles
 Workflow development platform
 Key success factors
 Outlook and future scenarios

3. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Background of IMPACT
 Project partners
– 26 Libraries, Research Institutes and Industry Partners
 Main objective
– Improve access to historical books and newspapers printed before 1900
 Software tools and prototypes
– Image Enhancement & Segmentation Toolkit
– Improved ABBYY FineReader OCR Engine, IBM Adaptive OCR
– Post-processing and -correction modules
– Lexical resources for several European languages
 Support to the MLA community
– Best Practises & Strategic/Operational Guidelines
– Online Helpdesk
– Tool Showcases & Demonstrators
– Centre of Competence

4. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Digitisation workflows
 Digitisation: a sequence of steps, from selection of analogue source
material to presentation of digital objects for end-users
 Workflow: software-based execution of a sequence without human
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interaction
 Challenges and barriers
– Workflows are tailored to specific needs
– Lack of interoperability for applied software and input/outdata data
– Lack of collaboratively used and developed resources and expertise

5. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Collaborative workflow development
 Workflow Development as a community-driven activity using an
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experimental platform
 Scientific workflows: using web services representing individual
software modules (Shiyong Lu et al. 2009)
 Providing highly innovative and efficient tools to a wider community to
design workflows
 Technical staff providing the platform, conceptual/library staff
designing workflows
 Using Web 2.0 features to share and expand knowledge and
resources

6. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Architectural platform principles
 Modularity
 Transparency
 Flexibility
 Extensibility
 Open standards based
 Accessibility
 Scalability
 Collaboration

7. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Workflow development platform

8. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Workflow development phases

9. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Evaluation criteria
 OCR: correctly recognised characters/words
 Segmentation: correctly identified text and graphical regions
 Workflows: comparing workflows and identifiying most suitable
 Statistical and provenance data: e.g. processing time
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10. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Outlook
 Keys to success
– Joint effort by library and software development staff
– Usability of tools and platform
– Incentive to collaborative work
– Testing and adaptation of workflows
– Permanently tailoring and optimizing workflows
 Future work
– Demonstration of current (web) services
– Experimental platform as sustainable resource for a Centre of
Competence for the MLA community

11. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
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Thank you very much!
Contact:
Project Website: http://www.impact-project.eu
Project Office: impact@kb.nl