The IMPACT Centre of Competence in Digitisation is a not for profit organisation with the mission to make the digitisation of historical printed text in “better, faster, cheaper”. It will provide tools, services and facilities to further advance the state-of-the-art in the field of document imaging, language technology and the processing of historic text.
The IMPACT Centre of Competence is a productive network of experts in digitisation, building on the research and development of partners from the IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, which ran from 2008 to 2011 (See: www.impact-project.eu). A large-scale integration project funded by the European Commission, the IMPACT Project brought together libraries, imaging scientists, industry partners and digitisation professionals. The aim was to develop new approaches to OCR and language technology, as well as strategies and a forum for sharing best practice and expertise. The Centre of Competence that follows from the IMPACT Project aims to further this unique collaboration, building a sustainable environment that will allow research institutes, private sector partners and cultural heritage organisations to work together to continue to improve access to historical texts. This community will bridge the gap between specialist research and commercial/archival needs, providing access to a suite of specially developed tools, as well as large datasets of content from major European libraries and evaluation tools to support further research.