The METAe engine is a comprehensive software designed for the digitisation of printed material such as books and journals.

The functionality includes scanning, image pre-processing, OCR processing, XML mark up of the full text and automated metadata recording. The output of the METAe engine is an archival information package intended for further use within a digital library or document management system. In order to increase the availability of the data in the long run, the METAe project keeps to the relevant standards in the field: the Open Archival Information System (OAIS), the draft for a NISO standard on Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images, the MOAII format and XML as a basic format, to mention only a few.

The core of the METAe engine is an integrated layout and document recognition system designed to find the hierarchical structures constituting a book or journal, e.g. the issues and articles of a periodical or the chapters and sub-chapters of a book as well as other elements forming part of the layout, such as footnotes, page numbers, illustrations, or caption lines.

An international consortium of 14 partners, with universities, archives, and software companies among them, are co-operating in the EU-funded R&D project METAe and will contribute to answering the questions raised. The software development within the METAe project focuses on four areas:

- METAe engine: digital conversion software - OCR for Fraktur and old type faces - SGML/XML search engine - Web application ALO (Austrian Literature Online)