More than 3.3 million pages, amounting to 77 000 separate trade mark dossiers, have been digitised in the Patent Office of the Republic of Bulgaria (BPO) as a result of the Capture and Store Historical Files project.
The project, carried out within the framework of the European Cooperation Projects, aims at digitising paper files across the national and regional intellectual property offices of the EU to enable easy and rapid access to documentation and data related to trade mark and design dossiers.
The Bulgarian Patent Office started the project in 2019 with the support of the different teams at the EUIPO and BPO. Despite challenges in recent months due to COVID-19, the project was completed by June 2020, as scheduled.
One of the important contributions of this implementation for the IP community has been the development by BPO of the MEST Metadata Extraction Support Tool (MEST). The tool allows for the introduction of an Optical Character Recognition scanning process that is capable of extracting data from scanned documents, in order to facilitate the decisions capture process.
Seven Intellectual Property Offices have now completed the project, with another five in progress. The total number of dossiers digitised currently stands at more than 850,000.
The completion of the digitization process in the Bulgarian office marks the next step in the ultimate goal of the project: to support the participating offices in creating a paperless working environment and to help users interact digitally with the national and regional intellectual property offices of the EU.
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