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Re: Keying-in scanned manuscript text



You may want to look into the JSTOR project.  JSTOR has scanned scholarly
journals and made them available over the web, for the most part to students
and faculty of subscribing universities.  The scanned images are read by the
end users, but text versions of the journals were also produced using OCR.
Although the text is not perfect,  it is satisfactory for full-text
searching. So, depending on what you mean by making the information more
useable, this may be an economical alternative for your project.

For more information, see the JSTOR web site at   http://www.jstor.org/

-----Original Message-----
From: Sharlane Grant [mailto:stgrant@MAIL.SHSW.WISC.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 10:40 AM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Keying-in scanned manuscript text


I am working with an agency that has scanned (starting some years back and
with minimal associated metadata linked to the scans at this point) some
600-700 logs (about 100-200 pgs each) of the original land surveys of
Wisconsin.  The organization of these logs is complicated due to the ways
large scale surveys were conducted--multiple surveyors surveying via various
somewhat haphazard paths over many years to cover the entirety of a state.

In order to make this information more useable (and to develop the
possibilities for internal and external links), the agency is weighing the
relative costs and benefits of either isimply ndexing the contents directly
or keying in the entire text to develop a broader capacity for ultimate
searching and linking.  For a variety of complicated reasons, indexing is
seeming the less feasible (even economically) and potentially more limiting
of the two options.  Even so, it would help to talk with anyone with similar
experience or expertise to lend to the matter.

Does anyone know of one or more situations where an organization has opted
to key  full text of scanned manuscripts rather than merely index them
directly from the mss?

Thanks, in advance,
Sharlane Grant
Preservation Officer
State Historical Society of Wisconsin
816 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
608/264-6474

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Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
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