Of BTA Archives Presented at 40th MINDS Conference

A presentation detailing the digitization of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency’s (BTA) extensive historical archives was given at the 40th Media Innovation Network (MINDS) conference in Vienna on Thursday. The BTA’s archives encompass over 125 years of documentation, including millions of news bulletins and hundreds of thousands of photographs covering significant events both within Bulgaria and globally. The 40th MINDS conference, held from April 22 to 24, concentrated on utilizing artificial intelligence and other methods to maintain an accurate, reliable, sustainable, and accessible information base.

Attendees included top representatives from international news agencies. At the forum, BTA officials, including the head of the Digitization of BTA’s Specialized Archives and Reference Funds project, presented the ongoing digitization effort. This initiative is part of a Ministry of Culture project for digitizing various national funds, which BTA joined in 2021 under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

The BGN 4 million project began in July 2023 and is scheduled to continue until June 2026. BTA aims to preserve and digitize one of Bulgaria’s richest archives. During the presentation, the team detailed challenges such as handling content written in old Bulgarian orthography, preserving damaged pages, and addressing metadata gaps for photographs.

Examples included the digitization of the agency’s first news bulletin from 1898. To date, 37 specialists have digitized 4.4 million out of 5.3 million pages and 644,000 out of 1.8 million images from the 1898–2012 period. The project utilizes best practices for digital archiving, promising improved efficiency, enhanced public access, and future integration with an online platform.

Furthermore, the BTA proposed establishing a dedicated BTA Institute at the conference, intended to collaborate with 15 Bulgarian AI organizations to develop freely accessible media products.

Topics: #archives #minds #conference