Speaker
Description
One of the Austrian National Library’s Strategic Goals for 2023–2027 is to create new ways for users to explore its collections. The improvement of ATR, especially OCR, falls within this context. During my presentation, I will talk about the currently ongoing OCR Project (2024–2027) and one of its main outcomes, an internal OCR Service. This Service contains a modular OCR pipeline using open-source models, that was built by ONB’s software developers. This pipeline has already produced OCR for a major 3rd party funded digitization project, “Viele Stimmen,” which entailed recognizing text on historical pamphlets with challenging layout and font. Finally, I will explain how the pipeline and the Service will be used in the future and discuss past and future challenges.