Blog del Instituto Cervantes de Sídney

Este portal es el resultado de un proceso de digitalización cooperativa del Ministerio de Cultura, las Comunidades Autónomas y otras instituciones de la memoria para preservar y hacer accesibles la Prensa Histórica publicada en España.

Esta nueva versión de la BVPH incorpora diversas novedades, entre ellas una importante y nueva funcionalidad que permite buscar por cualquier palabra de cualquier página de cualquier periódico digitalizado.

La solución, que debía garantizar el intercambio de información entre instituciones de todo el mundo, la ha proporcionado ALTO (Analyzed Layout Text Object) que se utiliza en grandes proyectos de reconocimiento óptico de caracteres (OCR) en prensa digitalizada, tanto de Europa como del resto del mundo y, muy especialmente, en Estados Unidos y Australia.

The Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers is the result of a process of cooperative digitizing by the Ministry of Culture and the Autonomous Regions and other memory institutions, whereby the intention is not only to preserve, but also to offer access to bibliographic materials that are denoted for being unique copies and, therefore, not easily accessible.

This new version of the Virtual Library of Historical Press (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica) has an important new function: the ability to search for any word on any page of any digital newspaper.

This new function was omitted at the start of the project so that optical character recognition could be completely assured without having to use a data processing solution that would be excessively dependent on just one brand or commercial product that would subsequently hinder information exchange, which is essential to a project such as this one, which is being carried out in cooperation between the Ministry of Culture and the Autonomous Communities, as well as a growing number of memory institutions. 

The solution was provided by ALTO (Analyzed Layout Text Object), which has been used in large-scale optical character recognition projects and press digitisation projects in Europe, the rest of the world and especially the United States and Australia.