The 2nd edition of the Succeed Awards recognised the successful evaluation and take-up of text digitisation tools implemented by the external libraries collaborating with the Succeed project. The awards were delivered during the Succeed Final Conference, that took place in the Bibliotèque national de France, in Paris, last 28th of November.
The second edition of the Succeed Awards committee was formed by the members of the Impact Centre of Competence Executive Board and took into account the quality of the evaluation, the amount of tools evaluated, the complexity of the tools and the implementation workflow.
Hildelies Balk, chair of the Impact Centre of Competence Executive Board, presented the prizes. The University Library of KU Leuven was the winner of this second edition, where nine libraries participated. The National Library of Finland and the University Library of Wroclaw received each a Commendation of Merit.
By one hand, the committee decided to give the award to the Library of KU Leuven because they did not only deliver good quality work, they were brave enough to tackle very complex tools like the ABBYY SDK: they used the external dictionary interface adding a historical lexicon, they tried pattern training and image enhancement and they gave results as to the influence of that on the OCR, evaluated with GT they created themselves. They also took on Named Entity recognition. They produced a Golden Standard for training and evaluation, and worked with NER-tools. This is far from trivial work. Their previous experience was producing and storing images. All the rest was completely new to them. As of next year digitisation workflow will be in place for OCR and NE recognition.
On the other hand, the National Library of Finland received a Commendation of Merit for their high quality evaluation and their useful input for future use of tools and evaluation. They worked with the Fraunhofer IAIS tools: Newspaper Segmentation, Korrektor and Document Deskewer.
The University of Wroclaw received a Commendation of Merit too. They deserved an honourable mentioning for producing their own ground truth, for modifying the workflow to fit in the tools and for having already digitised and published online several hundreds of digital objects using the tools evaluated.
[cvm_video id=”2507″]