Apex Revolutionizes Newspaper Digitization

Proprietary Technology
Newspapers present unique digitization challenges. Original materials can be damaged, skewed or discolored. Microfilm, depending on the level of technology used when created, can provide poor source images. Apex uses a variety of technologies, many of them proprietary, to overcome these challenges and produce quality digitized output.

While the process adjusts to a project's specific requirements, five major production processes are typically followed:

• Page Decomposition/Zoning
• Image optimization
• OCR
• Metadata encoding/OCR cleanup
• File assembly and export

Apex has become a trusted collaborative partner with some of the world's leading academic institutions and respected newspapers in the most successful ground-breaking digital projects.

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IZAAC^® -- Technology That Thinks
Automated approaches adequately convert information for simple layouts and standardized formats, but when applied to newspapers, the display images are usually unacceptable. The restricted logical analysis performed by a computer alone cannot recognize fragmented portions of a newspaper article even on the same page, let alone across pages. Apex created IZAAC^®, its proprietary Intelligent Zoning and Algorithmic Conversion system, to address these issues. IZAAC^® provides:

• Identification of fully formed articles
• Minimal errors in tagging and image correction
• High quality images
• Blending of computer power and human cognition
• Accurate metadata to enhance searches
• Any - or multiple - delivery formats

Every Article Is Complete
IZAAC^® treats each article as a complete newspaper story. This concept is extended to a number of newspaper elements, including small, continuous units of like content, such as news briefs and classified ads, and stand-alone features, such as photographs, illustrations, and crossword puzzles. These zones are identified, cleaned and corrected, and then digitized to create a highly indexed and searchable electronic newspaper database.

Your Users Will Thank You
By choosing IZAAC^® technology for your newspaper digitization initiative, your organization will

• Build a rich and rewarding research experience for your users
• Make your newspaper collection more valuable and accessible
• Preserve intellectual and cultural history

For more information on IZAAC's digitization capabilities for historic newspapers and other materials, and how we can help you with your digitization initiative, contact us.