TYPE: Digital
Institution: Europeana.pro
Year: 2021-Ongoing
Result: video and collaboration

Description: Access and preservation have been two main driving forces since the beginning of mass digitisation. In its early days, people were delighted to see scanned images of objects from collections that were thousands of miles away. However, today the concept of access is complex and encompasses the need for advanced search tools to support the discovery of content in big digital collections.
This video (available both in English and Bulgarian) illustrates how the demands of users (in this case - researchers) can be met by digital collections of newspapers and tools to improve access to them. In particular, it shows ongoing work on Bulgarian newspapers within the DISTILL project, funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund. The project also addresses the issue of different spelling; someone fluent in modern Bulgarian could read most of a text which is 100 years old, but could not generate all potential spellings of a search phrase to match different conventions.
In essence, the video is about collaboration and demonstrates how the wider context of infrastructures can make it possible in the form of large scale European projects. It also offers an example of how students can be involved in developing additional search tools for research.

Concept: Dr. Milena Dobreva
Link: DISTILL project