Case Study: National Assembly Library of Korea achieves a searchable, accessible digital library with ABBYY Recognition Server (ABBYY)

ABBYY Recognition Server® Digitizes the National Assembly Library of Korea

The National Assembly Library of Korea, a leading national library housing over 160 million pages of parliamentary, government and international materials, faced a major challenge: much of its collection existed as images and image-only PDFs, making content unsearchable and inaccessible to visually impaired users.

Working with ABBYY partner ReTIA and developer DBPortal, the library implemented ABBYY Recognition Server in a web-based OCR system that converts files to ALTO XML, provides real-time OCR and TTS, and feeds a searchable database. The solution created a fully searchable digital library, introduced voice services for visually impaired patrons (benefiting roughly 250,000 people), and significantly reduced the time and human effort required to digitize and manage collections.

National Assembly Library of Korea

Eun Chul Lee

Ph.D., Chief Librarian