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ABBYY Recognition Server Gives New Life and Worldwide Web Access to Historic Periodicals for the National Library of Lithuania


“50,000 periodicals processed in 3 months with better quality, less effort, less expenses and less time than was expected,”

- Edvinas Ragutskis, project manager of “INFO-TEC” Paslaugu centras


National Library of Lithuania is a proud preserver of Lithuanian cultural heritage, and is one of the participants in TELplus project of The European Library. TELplus is a project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme, within the domain of “Digital Libraries”. This project aims to OCR more than 20 million pages of content in many languages, to make library data OAI compliant and therefore harvestable, to address usability issues through improved presentation of search results and to make improvements in semantic interoperability including multilingual search and retrieval As part of this project, archive of Lithuanian periodicals dated before 1940 had to be published on the library’s portal, www.epaveldas.lt.


In the spring of 2008 INFO-TEC, in collaboration with ABBYY’s local partner Affecto-Lietuva, UAB, won the tender to perform this project. “The goal of the project was to create a databank of digital cultural heritage content from archives, libraries and museums”, comments Edvinas Ragutskis, INFO-TEC. Thousands of historic newspapers and magazines were to be OCR’d and made searchable. A project of such scale and importance required a reliable software provider, and INFO-TEC knew that ABBYY’s OCR technology could fill those shoes, because of their existing positive experience working with ABBYY FormReader.


To perform OCR on 100,000 pages and archive them in searchable format INFO-TEC chose ABBYY Recognition Server 2.0 – an acclaimed server-based OCR technology – that ran on 1 server, 500K PPM, with Advanced Export add-on, 15 recognition stations and 3 additional verification stations.

“Many periodicals must have been in pretty fragile stage, because the source TIFFs that we got were quite hard to read. This is understandable, given that the fonts and the language were 70-100 years old”, continues E.Ragutskis, “Our quality benchmark was 95%, but, nonetheless, ABBYY’s powerful OCR provided better than expected results”.


The results were indeed outstanding:

• INFO-TEC could profitably offer their services for ¼ of the initial budget planned by the National Library of Lithuania

• Recognition and verification were done easier than expected

• ABBYY Recognition Server offered flexible work distribution and prioritization

• Results were delivered faster than required


Thanks to Recognition Server and the experience of INFO-TEC and Affecto, 50,000 historic periodicals were revived and uploaded to “Electronic Heritage” portal, where they can easily be keyword-searched and accessed in great legible quality. Hence, the great heritage lives on!



Recognition Server was truly a “pleasure to work with”, according to E.Ragutskis. “It provided unsurpassed recognition quality, ease of verification, flexible workflow configuration and allowed to complete the project easier than expected. Project was made with a budget 4 times smaller than initially planned.”


About National Library of Lithuania

Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania (NLL) was founded in 1919. It is a principal Lithuanian research library open to the public and is simultaneously functioning as a parliamentary library. For more information, please visit http://www.lnb.lt/.


About INFO-TEC Paslaugų centras

INFO-TEC Paslaugų centras, is information technology company, founded in 1991. Main business areas of INFO-TEC Paslaugų centras are: IT infrastructure services, document capture services, storage and management of electronic documents, sales of computer hardware and software, warranty and non-warranty services. For more information, please visit http://www.infotec.lt/.


About Affecto Lithuania

Affecto Lietuva (previously - Informacinės Technologijos) is one of the largest IT services providers in Lithuania. It specializes on development and implementation of core business applications, providing solutions for ECM, ERP, BI, GIS. Since 2004 the company is a part of AFFECTO Group which is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. AFFECTO Group has subsidiaries in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Poland.For more information, please visit www.affecto.lt.