Alliances

IMPACT works in collaboration with the following initiatives to share best practices and expertise.

Open Preservation Foundation (OPF)

OPF is an international, nof-for-profit membership organisation which sustains knowledge and technology for the long-term management of digital cultural heritage and provides its member with reliable solutions to the challenges of digital preservation.

READ Coop

The Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ), project is an EU-funded collaboration focused on making archival material more accessible through the use of automated text recognition technology, for both handwritten and printed text. This technology is made freely available through an expanding research infrastructure known as Transkribus. Users can work with the Transkribus expert client now to automatically transcribe and search a collection of digitised manuscripts. In the coming months, they will also be able to use our technology to train themselves to read handwritten documents, participate in crowdsourcing projects and digitise and process documents on a mobile phone. Computer scientists working on the READ project are developing Handwritten Text Recognition and associated technologies on a large and diverse data set, which means that it is possible for computers to transcribe and search any kind of handwritten document, from the Middle Ages to the present day, from old Greek to modern English. Users can search in the full-text of large historical collections and extract information such as person names or data stored in tables and forms. This research has huge and exciting implications for the accessibility of the written records of our cultural heritage.