We did our scanning with Adobe products; originally we used Acrobat Capture to scan in the docs, then Acrobat itself to enter keywords, fix errors, etc. The system worked OK, but Capture still screwed up a lot of information, and it messed up some of the fonts, spacing, etc. OCR is kind of an inexact science to say the least, or at least in my experience.
I did have a minor stroke of genius (if I do say so myself) - I realized that Adobe Acrobat allows you to turn Microsoft Office documents into PDF format with a single click. I happened to work in the same department as the people who produced the memos & press releases, so I asked them to send me the Word files they used to create the releases. Once I had the Word files, I just clicked the "Print as PDF" button, and I had my searchable files. The conversion was much cleaner and faster than the scanning. This was not an option for old Releases that they didn't have Word copies of, so those had to be scanned, but going forward it saved a lot of time.
The final step for Acrobat PDFs is to run the Acrobat Catalog program
(it comes with Acrobat when you buy it). This runs through all your
PDF files in a specificed directory & indexes the terms, which you
can then use Acrobat Reader to search for, as long as it knows where you've
kept the indexes.
Hope that helps,
DS
Jacqueline Haun wrote:
Daniel,--Would you mind telling me what software you were using for both the
scanning into OCR and the database itself? I've been working with a member
of another department here that is trying to develop an in-house database
for their departmental materials such as press releases. His ideal would
be something you can scan in and search without a great deal of other text
input or tweaking since most of the staff is not "clerically oriented."
(It's the athletic department.)Thank you for any information you can give me.
Daniel Sokolow
Archives Coordinator
North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System
155 Community Drive
Great Neck, NY 11021
dsokolow@nshs.edu
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