NDLI: Down on the OCR farm: how we produced searchable PDFs for 7 million documents in a student computer lab

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Mason, R. Schmidt, H. Trott, R.
Copyright Year	2005
Description	Author affiliation: UCSF Libr./CKM, San Francisco, CA (Mason, R.; Schmidt, H.; Trott, R.)
Abstract	The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library began with tobacco industry documents released to the public under the terms of the Master Settlement Agreement between the United States Attorneys General and five USA tobacco companies. Under terms of the agreement, approximately four million documents in digital format were produced in 2000. Roughly another three million have been produced since then and added to the collection. The documents were produced as TIF and PDF files. They were accompanied by some descriptive metadata and can be retrieved by elements such as date of production, title, author and document type. Unfortunately, metadata varies between companies, is inconsistent over time and was produced without authority control or keyword indexing. From the initial planning stages, the value of full-text searching of Legacy library documents was recognized, but prohibited by constraints on staff, software and system resources. Utilizing idle workstations in a student computer laboratory, 7 million searchable PDF documents were generated from 42 million TIF page images
Sponsorship	ACM SIG on Inf. Retrieval ACM SIG on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web IEEE Tech. Comm. for Digital Libr
Starting Page	391
Ending Page	391
File Size	126365
Page Count	1
File Format	PDF
ISBN	1581138768
DOI	10.1145/1065385.1065494
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2005-06-07
Publisher Place	USA
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)
Subject Keyword	Optical character recognition software Software libraries Workstations Distributed computing Legged locomotion Image databases Grid computing Image recognition Software systems Optical computing text-searching OCR distributed computing
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in