Commitment 4: Provision of historical parliamentary documents to the public

Context
The Plenary session Minutes are published on the Hellenic Parliament web portal, in pdf or/and word, txt formats from the 9th Legislative Period and forth. The bills’ introductory reports from 1993 and forth are also published.
Commitment description
The commitment aims to enrich the Parliament web portal content with the publication-in accordance with open standards- of digitized material concerning:
• Plenary Session Minutes from the 1st Legislative period to the 8th Legislative period (9-12-1974 to 22-8-1996)
• Introductory reports of bills tabled from 1975 to 1993.
It also aims at the partial conversion of parliamentary archives into electronic books (e-books), making them available to the public through the web portal.
OGP values
Access to information, legislative openness, technology and innovation for parliamentary transparency, accountability
Implementing bodies
Hellenic Parliament
Objectives
The provision and promotion of digital material to the public, relating to the parliamentary-political history of our country available at the Parliament’s Library, through modern integrated digital services.
The enrichment of the Hellenic Parliament web portal content with additional forms of electronic versions of parliamentary material files, that may be available also via mobile devices, is a new process that the Parliament has been committed to examine and adopt.
Milestones – Timescales
• Investigation and adoption of specialized optical character reading software (OCR) that will be able to accurately digitize printed material written on a typewriter.
• Digitization using optical character reading software of historical material relating to Minutes of Plenary Sessions and to Bills introductory reports.
• Systematic quality control in resulting digitized text files and application of necessary corrections.
• Documentation of the digitized material and its progressive publication on the Hellenic Parliament portal.
Concerning e-books creation, the following actions will be implemented:
• Exploration and adoption of open standards for the creation and reading of electronic books and open source applications.
• Pilot electronic book creation on different categories of parliamentary documents.
• Finalization of e- books structuring by category of parliamentary documents.
• Activation of e- books creation and publication process for selected categories of parliamentary material.