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Weekly News Digest
February 21, 2008 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

Microsoft Utilizes ABBYY FineReader Engine for Live Search Books

Microsoft’s project is helping to bring together the world’s books into a collective, globally accessible and searchable archive. The scanning of book titles from a number of large library collections is underway, including the University of California, the University of Toronto, The British Library, Yale University, The New York Public Library, and Cornell University.

ABBYY’s OCR technology has been selected for a series of high-profile book scanning projects, including the Gutenberg-DE Project, The Million Book Project at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the Million Book Project, an international undertaking led by Carnegie Mellon University. As part of its efforts to support library and book digitization projects, ABBYY developed a special version of its FineReader OCR software, called FineReader XIX, to recognize the elaborate "Fraktur" or "black letter" texts from the period between 1600 and 1938 and old European type fonts found in books printed in the 17th to 20th centuries. The special omnifont OCR system was first developed as part of the METAe project, a research and development project co-funded by the European Commission (5th Framework, IST Programme, Area "Digital Heritage and Cultural Content").

Source: ABBYY