On February 21st, we celebrated our 1st IMPACT Hour, quarterly meetings in which our members are able to informally exchange information, expertise and good (and bad) practices in the field of digitisation in a safe environment.
This 1st edition of the IMPACT Hour was attended by 26 people from different IMPACT member institutions and was chaired by our Executive Director, Sally Chambers.
Sally presented a brief history of IMPACT, starting with the EU-funded projects IMPACT and SUCCEED, coordinated by The National Library of the Netherlands and the University of Alicante, respectively. During this presentation, Sally highlighted some of the initiatives lately implemented by our members and other related institutions such as:
- An article by the Flemish Heritage Library on OCR evaluation
- The Digital Heritage seminars organised by the Royal Library of Belgium
- HIPE-2022: Shared Task on Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Multilingual Historical Documents
- GLAM Jupyter Notebooks by UA & Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
Then, Sally presented the results of the members’ consultation conducted during the second half of 2021, and in which we had the opportunity to identify key activities and priorities. This consultation led to the creation of our 2022 Action Plan whose strategic theme is Sharing & Sustaining Digitisation Knowledge and includes the following activities addressed mainly to our members, but sometimes open to the general public:
- IMPACT Hours (quarterly informal information exchange): restricted to members.
- IMPACT Webinars on different topics: priority registration for members.
- DATeCH International Conference: open to everyone with discount opportunities for members.
- IMPACT Dataset and Ground Truth Repository: open to everyone.
- COST Action Proposal preparation: open to everyone with priority to members.
After this presentation, the open discussion and information exchange started and led to the identification of collaboration ways among members in focused activities, projects and relevant resources for digitisation.
Our next IMPACT Hour will take place in April 2022, if you are interested in participating and taking part in our community, please visit the join us section to discover how to become an IMPACT member.