Digitalia - Research Center on Digital Information Management

In the digital world, sets of information can literally disappear with one click. Digitalia helps to save the valuable cultural heritage.

Digitalia has opened fully new opportunities to use the archived materials in research. – The Päivälehti Archives

For once a presentation to introduce a concrete solution. – Member meeting of the European digital archiving coalition, DLM-Forum, Haag

EXPERT IN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND LONG-TERM PRESERVATION

Digitalia was established in 2015. It is a joint research and development network formed by South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk), University of Helsinki, and The National Library of Finland.

Our solutions improve the opportunities to use digitized and born-digital material for e.g. academic research. We develop automated content analysis, optical character recognition, anonymisation and information visualisation in 3D environment. We process various types of documents: digitized text, photos, videos and historical newspaper resources, as well as e-mails and social media data. We do not provide digitization services, for them please contact Disec Oy.

Our work helps to make sure information is preserved for a long time, while being usable and reliable. We conduct migration research, i.e. advance in transferring digital information from obsolete media and repositories into novel ones. We improve the quality and usability of historical resources.

Digitalia’s collaboration partners include archives, libraries, research institutions, schools, companies and third-sector associations. We closely collaborate with education programs within the field of information management and digital archiving. In addition, we organise Summer School on Digital Information annually, in August.

In Xamk, Digitalia is a part of the focus area of digital economy. We continue the tradition from Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences in developing digital archiving solutions. We also support the strategic objective of the city of Mikkeli in operating as a hub of preservation and archiving.

Our projects are funded e.g. by The Regional Council of South Savo from the European Regional Development Fund.

HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?

Please contact us, when you need to develop the management of digital information!

Results of our R&D

Automated splitting of large PDF datasets, pilot of Helsinki City Archives
Automatically converting old e-mail folders into archive-compatible form, pilot of The Päivälehti Archives
Pilot on 3D visualisation of historical information
Open guides on digitization and knowledge management (in Finnish)
Open source solution for archiving personal information, pilot of Citizen Archive
Completing the archival of Karjala database with 11M records

Open historical data packages for newspapers, including guidance packages
Guidebook for using historical raw data, see more in GitHub
Integrating research results into the Digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi system: improved text recognition, named entity recognition and article extraction for the newspaper Uusi Suometar, automatic categorization of newspaper and journal pictures

Currently we work on DOM – Digital Open Memory project, which started in October 2019 and ends in September 2021. See project webpage.
Please check also Memory Campus, which operates in Mikkeli and serves as a hub for archives and libraries.