Backlog Conversion of Danish Musical Magazines

‘All files validated against the schema, very nice! I took a closer look at a random selection of files, and I am very impressed by the quality of Your work! Meta-data as well as OCR-treated text is of excellent quality, so, I think we can regard this as “mission accomplished” and sign the act of acceptance.’

Henning Olesen,
IT-project manager
The State and
University Library
Universitetsparken,
DK-Arhus

ATAPY acquires new clients in the field of media service

Nordic Sounds cover ATAPY prides itself on being able to handle the most challenging data capture tasks by employing its intelligent digitization approach — the approach that involves using special tools at all phases of the process to ensure high accuracy of the results with minimum manual effort.

One of the recent projects involving intelligent text digitization has been carried out for ‘Nordic Sounds’, a versatile Danish musical magazine uniting under its cover all kinds of musical genres that can be found in contemporary North European music. The print is widely distributed outside Denmark and therefore published in English.

‘Nordic Sounds’ editorship requested the creation of a digital archive for all issues up to the present moment. The resulting archive had to be not just a collection of digitized text but also a true archive that could be searched and structured. This goal is perfectly achievable using XML as an output format.

The task was committed to the Media Service Department of ATAPY. In order to meet the customer’s requirements, the department specialists had to create one XML file per article, which means that magazine contents analysis was needed. Although the majority of magazine materials were in English, a lot of proper names and quotations were in North European languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Icelandic). This peculiarity required special attention from engineer-linguists who worked on ‘Nordic Sounds’ digitization and XML conversion. Former and current experiences in processing multi language information sources (Danish in particular) was of a great use.

ATAPY Software achieved the goal on time (the project lasted approximately two months) with excellent quality acknowledged by ‘Nordic Sounds’.

Thanks to ATAPY, Starting May, 2005 Nordic Sounds magazine is available online as a resource in the Online Music Research Library.

After such a successful start, ATAPY digitized backlogs for two more popular Danish musical magazines: ‘MM’ and ‘GAFFA’. The GAFFA magazine archive (1983 up to 2008) is now available online with full keyword search and original page images retrieval.

About Aarhus University:

Aarhus University, located in the city of Århus, Denmark, is Denmark’s second oldest and second largest university (after the University of Copenhagen). The university was founded in 1928 and has an annual enrollment of more than 35 000 students. Aarhus University housed Denmark’s first professor of sociology (Theodor Geiger, from 1938-1952) and in 1997 professor Jens Christian Skou received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of the sodium-potassium pump.