Introduction
We would like to invite you to attend the IMPACT event "Project Outcomes - Passing the torch" on 26 June 2012, which will take place at the KB National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. Attendance of this event is free of charge, but we kindly ask you to register in advance through this page. 

The IMPACT project (January 2008 - June 2012) is a European research project focused on innovating OCR software and language technology to improve the digitisation of historical printed text. IMPACT is led by the KB National Library of the Netherlands. Our group of partners includes several major European national libraries, universities, research centres and two private sector companies (ABBYY and IBM Haifa). IMPACT recently launched the IMPACT Centre of Competence, a productive network of experts in digitisation that will build on the research and development of partners from the IMPACT project and continue to improve access to text.

Programme
The programme for this day is now available here.

IMPACT project outcomes
At the end of the project in June 2012, IMPACT is presenting the following results:

• The improved commercial OCR engine ABBYY FineReader 10 (the IMPACT FineReader)
•  IBM's Adaptive OCR engine with the CONCERT tool that facilitates OCR correction with volunteer involvement 
• Computerlexica for nine European languages (English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovene) and tools for lexicon building 
• A digitisation framework with facilities for wrapping all tools as web services, creating workflows with both IMPACT- and external tools and instruments, as well as resources for demonstrating and evaluating results
• An invaluable dataset of over half a million images from 11 European libraries (with extensive ground truth for 50.000 images), which can foster further research activities
• The Functional Extension Parser, a document understanding software tool capable of decoding layout elements of books
• A postcorrection tool with text and error profiler for interactive post-correction of OCRed documents
• Novel Approaches to preprocessing and OCR for future development
• The IMPACT Centre of Competence for digitisation: a unique network bringing together experts from different communities with the mission to make the digitisation of historical printed text in Europe faster, better, cheaper, and to provide tools, services and facilities for further advancement of the State of the Art in this field.

At this event, these project outcomes will be presented by IMPACT staff, along with results of several pilots that have been conducted with some of the tools at IMPACT libraries in early 2012.

Travel and hotels
The event will take place at the KB National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. The KB is easy to reach from abroad: Schiphol airport is only a 30 minute train journey away. The KB building is located next to the Central Station of The Hague: take the exit from platform 12 and you will arrive at the KB main entrance.

A list of recommended hotels near the KB is available here.

More information
On our website http://www.digitisation.eu/ you can find more information about our results and the IMPACT Centre of Competence, including various presentations and videos.

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