Digital libraries: Google backs François Rabelais University’s new project

François Rabelais University (Tours, France) will receive a $100 000 financial backing from Google for implementation of a rare documents digitization program.

Google will provide $50 000 to each of university’s two laboratories, which participate in the project: LI–EA 2101 (Automatic Data Processing Laboratory) and CESR–UMR 6576 (Center for Renaissance Studies).

The first one will work out software capable to recognize Old French symbols. So far such kind of work has been done manually.

CESR, in its turn, will carry out series of studies to develop an interface which will use new text processing rules. They will enable search tools to offer more accurate results fitting requests based on Old French words.