BnL elux. app for iPhone and iPad

“www.eluxemburgensia.lu” is the result of the National Library of Luxembourg’s project to digitize old Luxembourg newspapers. The site aims to collect and make available online all the documents that will be digitized by the BnL. This iPad app was designed and developed together with Sogeti in order to provide mobile access to the collection through an intuitive interface.

The digitization project has several aims:
- to promote the printed heritage while ensuring the optimal preservation of fragile originals, weakened by their age or frequent use;
- to provide public online access to this heritage (within the limits of copyright regulation);
- to allow the consultation of a publication by several people at the same time;
- to provide enhanced search methods for the digitized content.

The content of the newspapers has been run through optical character recognition (OCR) software in order to offer full text search. This entails mistakes in the recognition of words. These mistakes can have several reasons: bad paper quality of the originals, printing imperfections or decay over time of the paper. These imperfections mean that the OCR - with the current state-of-the-art technology - cannot correctly identify all the letters in the original. Additionally the zones of the articles have been defined, which made possible the reconstruction of the table of contents. The reader can thus use the table of contents to navigate through all the articles in an issue.

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