1. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Use of digitized and OCR-ised text collections by
the end users
Geneviève Cron
BnF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, French National Library)
07/05/10 Bratislava

2. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Gallica : BnF
digital library
 Since 1992
 OCR : since 2005
Over 1 000 000
documents
http://gallica.bnf.fr


3. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
OCR-ized documents on BnF Website
 Over 180 000 newspapers or
periodicals volumes (3 732 titles)
Ocr 98% OCR word accuracy
 Over 100 000 books Over 60% OCR accuracy
Average : 90 % OCR accuracy
07/05/10 Bratislava 3

4. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Users
 Internet Readers
– Readers in the library
– Mobile Readers
 Handicapped
 Europe 86%
– France : 70%
 Non readers
– OCR related works

5. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Number of visits per day

6. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Queries
 Among 1000 most frequent queries

7. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Content-based queries

8. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Thematic queries

9. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Bibliographic based queries

10. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Ocr workflows & accuracies at BnF
[0% , 60%]
[0% ,100%]
[60% ,100%]
Manual
Image OCR corrections 98%
(newspaper)
[98% ,100%]
Manual
corrections [99,9% ,100%]
99.9%

11. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Ocr Accuracy computation [0% , 60%]
 Estimation of number of correct words / characters per page
– Using service provider computation
 Using ABBYY word confidence
[60% ,100%]
 Using ABBYY doubtful word information
– Using presence in dictionary
 No statistics on [98% ,100%]
– Illegible areas
– Numbers
– Non-Iso characters
– Punctuations [99,9% ,100%]

12. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Ocr Accuracy 10% of BnF OCR-ized Collection [0% , 60%]
[60% ,100%]
90% of BnF OCR-ized Collection [98% ,100%]
[99,9% ,100%]

13. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
31%

14. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Ocr Accuracy
81 %

15. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
[0% , 60%]
According to an internal study :
no USE (only NOISE)

16. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Plain text indexation
 3 kind of documents :
– Bib only
– Bib + Table of Content [60% ,100%]
– Bib + Table of Content + OCR
 OCR is interesting when the words in the queries are not in the [98% ,100%]
bibliographic description
– Typically, newspaper
[99,9% ,100%]

17. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Word highlighting
 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57888872.r=BRATISLAVA.f259.langFR.hl
 ALTO (or ...) is required to describe the place of the word in the page
[60% ,100%]
[98% ,100%]
[99,9% ,100%]

18. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Press browse (most consulted documents)
 Search for « Bratislava » in the OCR-ized press 
[98% ,100%]
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4435907.zoom.r=bratislava.f1.langEN

19. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Genealogy
 Or history of personnal locality
– about 1/3 of queries
– Would have no interest whitout OCR since information is not in the notice
 BnF has (Commercial) Partnerships
– Ancestry [98% ,100%]
– …
[99,9% ,100%]

20. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Collaborative correction
 BnF signed an agreement with Wikimedia to provide 1400
books of various quality and period
– Anyone can correct OCR [60% ,100%]
  100 % accuracy
– http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Raoul_de_Cambrai/Texte_entier

21. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Anomyme_-_Raoul_de_Cambrai.djvu/82

22. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Quotations in research papers
“[…] Now, when these medicines were
required, the river was swollen and so
turbulent that its upward navigation was
almost impracticable. At length even the
task of burying the dead was more than
the living could perform, and the bodies
were tossed into the stream, or left for
beasts of prey, and for the gallinazos—
those dreadful carrion-birds, which do not
always wait for death before they begin
their work. Five months the English
persisted in what may be called this war
against nature; they then left a few men,
who seemed proof against the climate, to
retain the castle till the Spaniards should
choose, when the fit season arrived, to
[98% ,100%]
retake it and make them prisoners.”
[99,9% ,100%]
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5706366b.texteBrut

23. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Text to speech conversion
 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54789860.vocal.f16.langFR
[99,9% ,100%]

24. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
E Pubs
 BnF
 has only 3 epubs yet
 will have about 1000 at the end of the year
 Is thinking at ALTO to Epub conversion on
its high quality material
 but work is difficult due to book
structure (margins, footnotes)
[99,9% ,100%]

25. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Epub difficulties : book structuration
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k73555s.textePage.f70.langFR

26. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Tel+ indexation
 http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/cooperation/telplus/
 http://search.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/en/index.html?lang=en&pub=&bid=
a4d79516-5b46-102a-81b6-ceee3e6c61a2&q=%22%22
[99,9% ,100%]

27. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Learning datasets
 Image + Its Text Conversion
– Learning datasets for OCR
– Evaluation sets for OCR related projects
[99,9% ,100%]

28. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
To conclude [0% , 60%]
 Uses are highly depending on
– OCR accuracy [60% ,100%]
– Format
[98% ,100%]
[99,9% ,100%]