TannerRitchie Publishing - Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern History

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This short document arose from a submission to the "Making Historical Manuscripts Computer-Readable" meeting, Monticello, February 2007.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Scanned images of the books are processed by OCR software to create 'searchable ebooks'. This process adds greatly to the nineteenth century indices, which are usually far from detailed, and do not include subjects. The books are therefore made accessible to entirely new forms of research.

OCR is usually highly accurate with any book published post 1800. Accuracy can be close to if not better than retyped pages. The pdfs are then marked up to make navigation of the files easy when browsing for particular pages, years or subjects.

MEMSO - Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online

Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online is our most important publication. A subscription to MEMSO provides access to our complete and constantly growing catalogue, along with many additional features that provide increasingly powerful methods of access to our publications.

The full OCRed texts are added into a database to allow fast searches of the entire resource for keywords and phrases. The search interface has been specifically designed to assist with non-standard spelling and multiple languages. Systematic research of these widely used volumes, which has previously taken many months of painstaking research, can now be done in seconds.

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