Digitisation Processing and Recognition of Old Greek Manuscipts (the D-SCRIBE Project)

After many years of scholar study, manuscript collections continue to be an important source of novel information for scholars, concerning both the history of earlier times as well as the development of cultural documentation over the centuries. D-SCRIBE project aims to support and facilitate current and future efforts in manuscript digitization and processing. It strives toward the creation of a comprehensive software product, which can assist the content holders in turning an archive of manuscripts into a digital collection using automated methods. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing early Christian Greek manuscripts. We propose a novel digital image binarization scheme for low quality historical documents allowing further content exploitation in an efficient way. Based on the existence of closed cavity regions in the majority of characters and character ligatures in these scripts, we propose a novel, segmentation-free, fast and efficient technique that assists the recognition procedure by tracing and recognizing the most frequently appearing characters or character ligatures.

Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum – Meeting the Challenges of Digitisation

The conservation, spread, comprehension and recreation of traditional culture heritages is one of the main purpose of the National Ethnographic Museum in Bulgaria. As other cultural and scientific heritage institutions, it begins to use new information technologies and strategies for providing access to its cultural heritage treasures. This paper aims to present digital libraries with multimedia content as a modern technological solution for innovative presentation of Bulgarian ethnographical heritage. It includes some basic concepts of digital libraries with multimedia content and a description of three types of architecture. The paper also describes the ideas, conceptual decisions and strategies in the project Experimental Digital Library “Bulgarian Ethnographic Treasury”.

Digital Preservation and Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage: Presentation of the KT-DigiCult-BG Project

The fast development and wide application of digital methods, combined with broadened access to the Internet and falling computing costs, have created intense interest in electronic presentation and access to cultural and scientific heritage resources. Information technologies have offered cultural institutions new opportunities for the presentation of their holdings, which are now made accessible not only to the specialists, but also to the citizens and interested parties worldwide. The paper presents an overview of the Bulgarian experience in the field of digital preservation and access and on-going work on the project “Knowledge Transfer for the Digitisation of Scientific and Cultural Heritage to Bulgaria” (MTKD-CT-2004-509754) supported by the Marie Curie programme of the FP6 of the EC.

MINERVA – the Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation Towards an Agreed European Platform for Digitisation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage

MINERVA is a project funded by the European Commission IST Programme within the 5th Framework Programme. It created a network of EU Ministries and other agencies in charge of cultural policies and programmes, which is open to enlargement to new countries and new sectors of the civil society. The network discusses, correlates and harmonises the activities carried out in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage, aiming at creating a common European platform made up of agreed recommendations, guidelines, standards. The network acts also to foster collaboration between European Commission and Member States, to ensure awareness of European policies at national level, to exchange good practice, to coordinate national programmes in order to embed in national digitisation activities the technical results achieved by the network. Some main outcomes of the activities are presented.

Digitisation and Presentation of Historical Materials in a Virtual Exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th Century’

The main contribution of this project is the study of collections of valuable documents related to the image of India in Bulgaria. Digital repositories of selected samples are constructed using modern information technologies. The results are presented in a virtual exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th century’.