Japan digitises Parliament's National Library

The National Diet Library of Japan, the country’s only national library, is on its way to full-text digitisation with key collaborative features.
The prototype technology, created by IBM Research, allows full-text digitisation of the Diet’s (also referred to as the Parliament of Japan) literature to be quickly realized through expansive recognition of Japanese characters and enabling users to collaboratively review and correct language characters, script and structure.
The architecture of the full-text digitization prototype system provides the following two key collaborative features: Collaborative Correction, which allows simultaneous corrections by multiple users via web browsers and improves the accuracy of optical character recognition; and Collaborative Data Structuring, which is essential to digitizing texts for visually impaired people to read books using a voice browser.
According to Dr Hironobu Takagi, head of the development of the prototype technology at IBM Research Tokyo, “Until now, the breadth of the characters and expressions within the Japanese language had posed a series of challenges to massive digitization. In order to enable this transfer of knowledge from print to online, we realized the need for both machine and human intelligence to understand information in every form.” The digitisation will make Japanese literary artifacts widely available and searchable online. Additionally, the full-text digitization system is designed to promote future international collaborations and standardization of libraries around the world.

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