Europeana Newspapers Project started its second year

The project meeting at the National Library of France (BnF) was the closure and internal review of the first twelve months of the project. All work package leaders presented the work that had been done up to month twelve and the outlook for the coming year. Project partners were inspired to give their input for the following year.

The General Assembly that gathered at the annual meeting took decisions on a number of points that will help the project proceed as well as improve the decision making process of the project in the coming year. In the first year, the project had to build up its workflows, technical processes and datasets for refinement of digitized newspapers content, quality assessment, metadata model for aggregation and the presentation of the digitized newspaper content. 


Photo: Stefan Pletschacher of USAL presenting WP3 achievements in Quality AssessmentA dataset for refinement was developed and in addition to that a specification of requirements for OCR and structural refinement services for digitized newspapers in Europeana. Evaluation profiles for use scenarios were developed for quality assessment.  A survey was undertaken to identify and analyse all newspaper collections digitized by national, research and public libraries in Europe by 2012. The different metadata models of libraries currently in use for the digitization of newspapers are being analysed to design and release a comprehensive meta-data model. This second year the project will continue to build on these achievements and disseminate the results to promote the project and bring more content to Europeana.

 


Workshops will actively engage the stakeholders on the challenges that the project deals with. The project will be hosting three workshops till the end of the project. The first workshop will be on Refinement, the second on Aggregation and Presentation and the final workshop will be on Newspapers in Europe and the digital agenda forEurope.Information days will be organised to promote the project with the local audiences and will give local partners the opportunity to show their achievements in the project. The project will host ten information days in the countries of the project partners in the coming two years.


The official review from the European Commission will take place in Brusselson the 18th of March. This is the opportunity for the project coordinator and the work package leaders to show the achieved results of the past twelve months and the steps to take to continue and improve the results for the next year.


The upcoming events and achievements will be promoted on the website www.europeana-newspapers.eu.


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