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. These archives encompass over 125 years of records, including millions of news bulletins and hundreds of thousands of photographs documenting significant events both within Bulgaria and internationally. The 40th MINDS conference, held from April 22 to 24, focused on employing artificial intelligence and various other models and tools to maintain an accurate, reliable, sustainable, and accessible information base.
Attendees included representatives from global news agencies, such as BTA Director General Kiril Valchev, Secretary General Julia Sokolova, and project leads for the digitization effort. At the forum, BTA representatives presented their project to digitize its 125-year-old records. This initiative is part of a Ministry of Culture project supporting the digitization of various national funds.
The project, budgeted at BGN 4 million, commenced in July 2023 and is scheduled to continue until June 2026. BTA’s strategic objective is to preserve, store, and digitize one of Bulgaria’s most comprehensive archives. Participants were briefed on the challenges encountered, such as content written in older Bulgarian orthographies, damaged physical pages, and metadata gaps for photographs.
The presentation showcased the digitization of BTA’s 1898 news bulletin, which covered topics ranging from royal health updates to Balkan stock markets. To date, the team has digitized 4.4 million pages and 644,000 images from the 1898-2012 period, achieving key project milestones. Furthermore, BTA proposed establishing a dedicated BTA Institute at the conference, intending to collaborate with 15 Bulgarian AI organizations to develop accessible products for the broader media sector.
Topics: #archives #minds #conference
This digitized archive sounds like an invaluable resource for media historians.
What are the primary challenges or next steps involved in digitizing such a vast collection of historical news records?