23 April 2007

Footnote adds some OCR capabillities

After a little experimental searching, it appears that Footnote has added some OCR capabilities, at least for some of those records that were typed in the first place. While experimenting around with the Investigative Reports of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922, I noticed that results were coming from within the body of a document, not just the bibliographic citation. The part of the page containing the located text is enlarged, so one can tell if the word is really the desired one.

My search for Mimke and Mimka turned up some interesting hits, only a few of which were because of the first name Mimke/Mimka--which is what I was actually looking for. However, I did like that on the results page was a snippet of the page showing the located item. This way I can determine if I need to view the entire page or not. This is a helpful feature--especially for those who are still on dialup.

Footnote's website can be viewed here http://www.footnote.com

Of course, OCR technology is difficult to perform on handwritten text.