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 the agency’s history, containing millions of news bulletins and hundreds of thousands of photographs documenting significant events both within Bulgaria and globally. The 40th MINDS conference, held from April 22 to 24, focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and other advanced methods to maintain an accurate, reliable, sustainable, and accessible information base.
Attendees included representatives from leading international news agencies. BTA leadership, including Director General Kiril Valchev and Secretary General Julia Sokolova, were present alongside project leads for the digitization of the specialized archives. During the forum, the team presented the project, which is part of a Ministry of Culture initiative for digitizing national heritage materials.
The BTA project, valued at BGN 4 million, commenced in July 2023 and is scheduled to continue through June 2026. BTA’s objective is the preservation, proper storage, and digitization of one of Bulgaria’s most significant archives. The presentation highlighted the technical challenges encountered, such as deciphering content written in old Bulgarian orthography, handling severely damaged pages, and managing metadata for photographs.
The team showcased the digitization of the BTA’s first news bulletin from 1898, which covered topics ranging from royal health updates to Balkan stock markets. To date, 37 specialists have digitized 4.4 million pages out of 5.3 million and 644,000 images from 1.8 million available between 1898 and 2012. The project aims to enhance efficiency and public access to the historical materials, and BTA also proposed establishing a dedicated BTA Institute to develop AI-driven tools for the broader media sector.
Topics: #archives #minds #conference
