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Archiver > CT-Waterbury > 2004-10 > 1097196074


From: "Patty" <>
Subject: Re: [Waterbury] Proof-readers wanted: Anderson's Waterbury
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 17:41:14 -0700
References: <4163FB7C.4060308@askgar.com> <BAY3-DAV30pfTYSl1q400000f76@hotmail.com>


Hay Jeanette,

I am in Kennewick, Wa. ...

Patty

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeanette Boden" <>
To: <>
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2004 5:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Waterbury] Proof-readers wanted: Anderson's Waterbury


> Hi Gary,
> I would be happy to help, so send me a chapter or more. Are you sending
> by email or snail mail?
> Either way is fine.
> Jeanette in Spokane, WA
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Gary Warner<mailto:>
> To: <mailto:>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 7:04 AM
> Subject: [Waterbury] Proof-readers wanted: Anderson's Waterbury
>
>
> Well, I've finally broken down and started processing and scanning
> Anderson's Town and City of Waterbury. Its over 2,600 pages long all
> together.
>
> The goal of the project is to have not only "images" of the pages of the
> book, but to convert them to a full text search capable format.
>
> Right now I'm using the built-in Optical Character Recognition in
> Windows 2000 to convert each chapter to a Word document. Once the Word
> documents are proofed, then I'll add a higher resolution scan of the
> photographs and figures from the book, and create a PDF for each chapter.
>
> The problem is that in these very old books, OCR is tough. Some of the
> characters are "raised" (if you drew a line across the bottoms of the
> characters, some float really high above the line) and because of the
> use of handset print, the same character can vary any number of ways.
>
> What I'm looking for is volunteers who would say "Send me a chapter".
>
> I would send you a GRAPHICS IMAGE version of the chapter, and a Word
> document version of the chapter. We need the Word document to be
> "manually cleaned up" to match the image.
>
> Some examples:
>
> New f-la' -en (should be New Haven)
> His tory mr 858 (should be History, 1858)
> Basset t"were (should be Basset" were)
>
> There are Many Many errors that have to be corrected by hand. I've
> tried three different OCR methods, and this seems to be as clean as a
> machine is going to make it. On most pages, there is an average of one
> wrong word every other line.
>
> Nobody is going to get paid for this. The completed chapters will be
> posted on our website and will be free to download for all. It takes me
> about an hour to get one chapter "scanned and ready", so if fifty of you
> respond today, it might be a couple weeks before I get your chapter to
> you. Please be patient.
>
> The end result of this project, which might be a year from now, is that
> we *ALL* have free access to a full-text searchable version of the three
> volume "Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut" by Joseph Anderson from
> 1896.
>
>
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