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Re: Digitizing Records from Microfilm



Posting on behalf of a colleague:

At 04:21 PM 6/15/00 -0500, Susan Dehler wrote:
>Our Computer Systems staff wants to purchase equipment and OCR software and
do the project in-house. My concern is that we do not really have the staff
to do this properly and that original handwritten records cannot be read
accurately by OCR software. >

In terms of scanning from microfilm, the equipment and software to do high
quality production scanning is expensive. Additionally, finding and training
knowledgeable staff to scan, QA, and create metadata from the microfilm will
take time and resources.

As other posts point out, OCR of some of this material may be problematic,
especially considering that your project consists of handwritten records and
the technology is still emerging.

There are many approaches to digitizing archival material. For some of the
material you may want to scan in grayscale, rather than just black and
white. The link below gives information on some of Preservation Resources'
current and past projects which have used bitonal or grayscale scanning from
microfilm.  We have scanned a wide variety of films, some of which was not
in optimal condition. Through customization and post scan editing, we have
achieved very good image quality.

http://www.oclc.org/oclc/presres/scanning/project_casestudies.htm

Lynn Wagner
Manager, New Products and Marketing
Preservation Resources
9 South Commerce Way
Bethlehem, PA 18017
wagnerl@oclc.org
<<http://www.oclc.org/presres/>>
1-610-758-8700
Fax 758-9700

-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Dehler [mailto:SDEHLER@VIGO.LIB.IN.US]
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 5:21 PM
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Digitizing Records from Microfilm


I work in a medium-sized public library which has quite an extensive local
history archives and genealogy collection. Our library director wants to
start digitizing records (marriage records, naturalization records, deeds,
etc) which are on microfilm and making them available on our Web page.  Our
Computer Systems staff wants to purchase equipment and OCR software and do
the project in-house.

My concern is that we do not really have the staff to do this properly and
that original handwritten records cannot be read accurately by OCR software.
Should we contract this work out to a reputable company?  Should we scan the
records as an image only rather than deal with OCR software?

Any thoughts or advice in this area would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Susan Dehler
Archivist
Vigo County Public Library

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A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

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