OCR at Footnote

One of the neat things about the records at footnote.com is that those that are typewritten are increasingly able to be searched using OCR technology. While OCR has limitations, it is decidedly easier than manually scanning or reading thousands of pages in an attempt to locate specific names.

The view results pages at Footnote.com now provide just a snippet of the actual page where the hit appears, showing what it actually looks like. This allows the user to manually determine whether or not the hit it what was actually being searched for. This is a nice feature of the viewer--so many times one has to load the entire image just to see what the hit was. And some names get OCR hits that are not quite what one was looking for. This makes it easier for me to scan the hits as I don't have to view each one separately. A neat idea.


You can start your free trial with footnote.com, just remember when it expires so you can make the decision about renewing before the end of the free trial period.