site.btaDigitization of BTA Archives Presented at 40th MINDS Conference

A presentation on digital life for BTA's  archives covering the agency’s more than 125-year history was made at the 40th Media Innovation Network (MINDS) conference in Vienna on Thursday.  The archives include millions of pages of news bulletins and hundreds of thousands of photographs, documenting important events in Bulgaria and around the world. 

The 40th MINDS conference, held from April 22 to 24, focuses on the use of artificial intelligence, as well as other methods, models, and tools for maintaining an accurate, reliable, sustainable, and accessible information base. Attending the forum are representatives of leading news agencies from around the world, including BTA Director General Kiril Valchev, Secretary General Julia Sokolova, English Service Directorate Senior Editor Kaloyan Kirilov, the head of the Digitization of BTA's Specialized Archives and Reference Funds project, Svoboda Chorbadzhiyska-Todorova, and Dimitar Genev, the project's system administrator.

At the forum, Chorbadzhiyska-Todorova and Genev presented the project through which BTA is digitizing its 125-year-old archives. It is part of a Culture Ministry project for the digitization of museum, library, and audiovisual funds, which the agency joined in 2021 within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Work on BTA's project, worth BGN 4 million, began in July 2023 with the delivery of four scanners and will continue until June 2026.

BTA's strategic goal is to preserve, properly store, and digitize one of Bulgaria’s richest archives.

Forum participants were briefed on best practices and the main challenges faced by the project team during the digitization, such as digitizing content written in the old Bulgarian orthography, severely damaged pages, the quality of the photographs, and the lack of metadata for them. 

Presented was the digitization of BTA’s first news bulletin from 1898, which contains information on the health of Princess Clementine (mother of Prince Ferdinand I), information on the stock markets in the Balkans, brief reports from European cities such as Vienna, Paris, and Istanbul, and news about upcoming duels in France and Austria-Hungary. 

A team of 37 specialists have digitized 4.4 million pages out of a total of 5.3 million pages in the BTA’s historical archive and 644,000 images out of a total of 1.8 million images from the 1898-2012 period, thereby achieving the project’s objectives. The digitization work utilized best practices for digital archiving and the most reliable strategies to protect data from unexpected loss or damage. The project’s results include improved efficiency, increased public accessibility, preserved heritage, future integration with the online platform, as well as faster access to the BTA archives.

In Vienna, the Bulgarian News Agency also presented its idea to establish a BTA Institute, to which 15 organizations in Bulgaria working in the field of artificial intelligence would be invited. The goal is to develop freely accessible products that will first be implemented at BTA and then across all other media outlets.