The coordinating body of OCR-D consists of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities Berlin, in particular the German Text Archive, and now the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. In future, the SBB will take over the work of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which withdrew from the project on 31 August 2016.

The work packages include long-term archiving and persistence, the Conception of workflows and use cases as well as the composition of training corpora. OCR-D investigates further development possibilities for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. The project sees itself as a coordinating body and network at the same time, bringing together developers, researchers and users to combine current research findings with practical requirements in a practicable solution. During the first project phase, development needs were identified on the basis of which module project calls will follow. In these, solutions for the development needs will be worked out and thus the current state of research on OCR will be brought together with the requirements from practice. The calls for proposals are planned for the first half of 2017. The results from OCR-D will have far-reaching changes for digitisation projects. In addition to the goal of preparing the transformation of the titles from the VD projects into machine-readable form, proposals for the DFG’s “Digitisation” practice rules will also be drawn up in response to the new findings in order to complete the media conversion of the entire written cultural heritage published in the German-speaking world in the medium to long term in the spirit of European and national agendas.