NovoDynamics™ and Bibliotheca Alexandrina Sign Research Partnership Agreement

May 24, 2006
Ann Arbor, MI

NovoDynamics, Inc., an Advanced Image Discovery Company and the creator of the world's most advanced Arabic language optical character recognition (OCR) solution, announced today a research partnership with Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the premier Library of Alexandria, Egypt, and a leader in library reference digitization. The mission of Bibliotheca Alexandrina is to be a center of excellence in the production and dissemination of knowledge. In line with this mission, the organization is taking serious steps towards building a universal digital library. A key challenge in digitizing its library is the conversion of its degraded Middle Eastern references into searchable computer text. In order to perform the conversion efficiently, Bibliotheca Alexandrina evaluated several computer software products that perform Arabic OCR. After completing its analysis, Bibliotheca Alexandrina selected NovoDynamics' VERUS™ Professional product as one of its digitization solutions. "We performed initial comparison tests between multiple OCR products to determine which one offered the highest recognition accuracy and we were very impressed with VERUS'™ performance and NovoDynamics' drive for product excellence," stated Noha Adly, Bibliotheca Alexandrina's ICT and ISIS (International School of Information Sciences) Director.

Based on NovoDynamics' superior technology and Bibliotheca Alexandrina's significant expertise in library digitization, the two organizations established a research partnership in order to advance NovoDynamics' commercial products. According to David Rock, President and CEO of NovoDynamics, "We are honored to be selected by the foremost library in the Middle East to accomplish the Library's goal of digitizing its historical collection of Middle Eastern language texts. We are excited about the opportunity to collaboratively work with Bibliotheca Alexandrina to create exciting solutions for library digitization, document management, and document exploitation markets."

NovoDynamics offers both Standard and Professional editions of VERUS. VERUS™ Standard provides recognition support for Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Dari, and Pashto languages, including embedded English and French text; automatic language and font detection; the ability to view both original and cleaned versions of a page; and an integrated spell checker for fast text verification. In addition to VERUS™ Standard features, VERUS™ Professional offers an application programming interface (API); distinguishes handwritten from machine printed pages; allows document images and their extracted text to be exported as PDF with hidden text files; and provides special plug-in technology that allows third-party machine translation products to be seamlessly integrated into the VERUS™ Professional environment.

NovoDynamics, located in Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A., is a leading supplier of image discovery software solutions and services. For more information, please visit http://www.novodynamics.com.

Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in 2002 to recapture the spirit of the ancient Library of Alexandria. The new Library and its affiliated research centers are devoted to using the newest technology to preserve the past and to promote access to the products of the human intellect. It is committed to work with partners all over the world, and is a center for intercultural dialogue, learning and understanding. For more information, please visit http://www.bibalex.org.