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Improve Optical Character Recognition

The existing OCR is poor. Many words are garbled, rendering search results meaningless

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  • VB commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    While I sympathise with the difficulties there must be with digitising many old publications, there are many times when I can see no reason why the OCR text is as bad as it is. I imagine that, as with some other software, a choice is being made between speed and accuracy; too often (on the Wiltshire Times, which I have used most recently) speed has been chosen, resulting in long sections of gobbledegook. There is so much OCR text that is so bad, I don't have time to correct it - if I want to use it, I have to transcribe it from scratch. I don't do that for BNA to benefit, while paying for it!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I use Trove from the NLA a lot and their OCR is vastly superior to the OCR results from the BNA.

  • johnjo commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This short example shows how bad the OCR can be!
    b^*T. fad to ala t.o* unfit r *f b* f aaapar.aj b* nvglMt or d«la> Th* 1«44i u*4l •u'kjntb «iU rtrw >• •oiiiMbiog • hi* L will |>ut them ,n 4 batuw tb*y lit«id iu u*for* •*» I tii4»*a* •urkinn. *f» 4l(*Adj m Uua bat tar pu«itA<4 in <i v«rk lOtalitVo* <jf lhe wvrti"g Ulna 1* *bonar condition* .J labcvr 4r« oaora aatiafactory; mwii cannot t» dri»#i» 4iid harAaaad tliay •ar» Tf.at ha* a trad# »n.wn •bt«b abiatda a«aiiiat tnanr abtiaaa •OK-h fortoarlr lb a* anbnut Bur* •* Worth But tb*M improtovitoou or* port

  • johnjo commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I am referring to recently scanned pages. The Lincs Chronicle of 1919 is almost useless. I would love to post here the text as read by OCR to illustrate this.

  • johnjo commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Sometimes it seems that the newspapesr you are scanning are of poor quality. They do fade and get damaged, and their storage affects their survival. It must be difficult to get hold of good copies quickly, so some rescanning may have to take place in the future

  • John Woolman commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    There are some quite common misreads such as 'tbe' instead of 'the' would it be possible to do a find all and replace all search

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I find that searching with 'EXACT' for a surname like IVIN picks up Giving and other such words this shouldn't be so with good OCR

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