On 08/04/13 20:59, Rob Owens wrote:
On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 09:30:52AM -0700, Gary Roach wrote:As for as OCR vs retyping vs scan and preses - still up in the air at this point. I suspect that all three methods might be used.There are commercial companies that will do bulk scanning and OCR. I used one in the past and I found the price to be pretty reasonable. I'm not sure if anybody has OCR software that works on hand-written documents, though... -Rob
If the database / digital storage space is not a problem I'd rather suggest storing scanned documents as they are (in graphical format) - you never know when this may come handy. Sometimes you want to see how the document looked like, not just to read its content only. And OCRed version for searching purposes, linked with the images.
I remember there was a (commercial, MS Windows) Russian OCR software some years ago, really good working then; probably it could handle handwriting to some extent:
http://finereader.abbyy.com/ I never used it for handwritten text though.Another option is to hire some teenagers or students who'd like to earn some additional money if you have funds for that - both ways need proof-reading afterwards.
Not sure which database would be good for storing images; is MySQL capable of managing it in an efficient way; perhaps Postgress SQL or another solution is better. You could also store the images on the drive and keep links (paths) to the images in the database.
Did you try contacting other institutions which might have similar needs - what do they use?
Kind regards, Michal -- Michal R. Hoffmann