[08/10/2025 06:11]

SOFIA-SABA
The archives of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) were hailed as a national treasure with vast potential for research, innovation, and cultural preservation during a panel discussion on language data, held as part of a seminar organized by the European Language Data Space and the Institute of Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Svoboda Todorova, head of BTA's Digital Archive project under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, presented the agency’s efforts in digitising and managing its vast collections, including a photo archive of 1.8 million images and over five million pages of journalistic material. She emphasized that these linguistic and visual resources are of strategic importance to Bulgarian society.

Todorova underscored the urgent need for a unified digital infrastructure, standardized metadata, and long-term strategies to ensure both preservation and accessibility.

“Some materials are so fragile that they begin to disintegrate even before they can be copied,” she noted, highlighting the time-intensive nature of the work—each page takes 5 to 6 minutes to prepare.

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