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Digitisation
Considerable efforts and resources are being invested in digitisation projects across Europe, but these activities are highly fragmented and many technical and organisational obstacles jeopardise their success and economic sustainability.
EU action to coordinate national digitisation programmes started with the eEurope 2002 Action Plan which, in the year 2000, called for measures to stimulate the development and use of digital content and for the creation of a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes. The fist step to implementation was the Lund Action Plan in 2001, establishing an agenda for actions to be carried out by Member States and the Commission.
The capture of analogue objects and their conversion to digital formats have been supported through the European Commission's IST work programmes under FP5 and FP6. A number of co-funded research projects and coordination actions were launched, some of which are listed below. Moreover, projects tackling the preservation of audio-visual objects and films have often a strong digitisation element.
For the complete project list and an overview of related research fields such as digital libraries or digital preservation, see the project section of this website.
Projects funded under the 5th and 6th Framework Programme
- CRISATEL (Conservation Restoration Innovation Systems for image capture and digital Archiving to enhance Training, Education and life-long Learning)
- CRISATEL's developments allow for paintings to be captured, electronically archived and restored, and printed for demonstration and exhibition purposes. The project has developed equipment for the direct fast capture of the originals, with a new ultra-high definition multi-spectral scanner (ultraviolet to infrared) with a homogeneous lighting system. One part of the research work was spectrometric analysis of varnish layers to allow the effect of an aged varnish to be substracted from the image of a painting.
- ISYREADET (Integrated System for Recovery and Archiving Degraded Texts)
- The physical deterioration of manuscripts and archive material is a major loss to European Cultural Heritage. This project has realised a new technique for the virtual restoration of degraded texts. Multispectral imaging reveals hidden features in a damaged document, and the digital image is enhanced with various image processing techniques in order to increase the readibility of the text for OCR software.
- MEMORIAL (A digital document workbench for preservation of personal records in virtual memorials)
- A challenging area of digitisation work centres on personal records in typewritten form which were used principally between 1920 and 1990. For the purpose of this project, documents from former Nazi concentration camp museums in Europe were used together with documents from related archives throughout the world. MEMORIAL was focused on computer-aided information retrieval from typewritten paper documents. Key areas of development included meta-description of data, optimised scanning, optical character recognition (including image pre-processing and segmentation) and human interaction in post-processing. The core of the system is the 'Digital Document Workbench' where the whole lifecycle of the document can be controlled. The system developed under the project is available as a prototype product for the archive community.
- META-e (Metadata Engine)
- The project dealt with part of the digitisation process, namely the capture of metadata. It developed software modules in order to automate metadata capturing by introducing layout and document analysis as a key technology for digitisation software.
- MINERVA (FP5) and MINERVAPLUS (FP6) (Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in digitisation)
- MINERVA was set up in 2002 as a network of EU Member States' ministries and cultural agencies with the mission to facilitate the adoption of the Lund action plan on the coordination of digitisation programmes and policies. The network aimed at harmonising activities carried out for the digitisation of cultural and scientific content and at coordinating national programmes. Under FP6, the MINERVA network has been extended to 'MINERVAplus' and includes now also new EU Member States, Russia and Israel.