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The Moravian Library in Brno (MZK) has an extensive digital library containing a wide range of digitized documents. Most of these documents include OCR version used mainly for search and discovery purposes. For some document categories, the standard OCR did not produce adequate results: most notably manuscripts, old prints with variants of gothic script and scans of newspapers from microfilms. To solve this problem, MZK joined forces with the Brno University of Technology to develop a machine learning based OCR system for these categories of documents. Currently, the results of the PERO project can be tested on-line either through a web-based interface or an API. The software is open source and is already in use by several institutions. The paper will present current capabilities of the system as well as some of the secondary results of the project.
The presentation introduces the common portal of Czech libraries, which has been in use for five years. The portal serves as a gateway to collections and services of a number of Czech libraries. Embedded in The Strategy for the Development of Libraries in the Czech Republic, it is a key project in the world of Czech libraries. It was primarily designed to search the collections of all participating libraries and other sources (e.g. bibliographies, databases, collections of law documents, etc.) and provides an online interlibrary loan system. Far from being a mere search platform, the portal performs an educational and curatorial role, our team makes inspiring reading lists and creates web pages on selected topics, drawing on the collections of the participating libraries and other memory institutions. We mostly use open source software (VuFind, Solr, etc.), with the exception of the linking server and the index of foreign sources. Tools developed by the Moravian Library for indexing and data deduplication, as well as all local modifications of VuFind, were developed under an open source license, so they can be used by other libraries and VuFind itself benefits from our improvements where possible. Besides the common development of IT tools, the portal fosters library cooperation on all levels: being involved in a common project, sharing their collections and working together to popularise the portal among library users.