[Web4lib] A Delicious Future for Libraries?

[Dale Askey]

> To speak specifically to the "anglophone bent", we should not be so
> derisive to the collection policies of Michigan, Stanford, et al as to
> imagine that they have only collected books from Western countries
> over the last several centuries. A significant portion of their
> holdings are in non-Western languages and scripts, and they will be
> scanned along with everything else. Now, granted, some search tools
> for indexing and retrieving non-Roman characters and scripts would be
> immensely valuable and important.

Well, of course they have massive portions of their collections in 
non-Western languages; I wasn't being the least bit derisive about 
anyone's collection policies. That's not the point. The point is that 
there are certain scripts--hence my mention of Fraktur, which is, simply 
put, an odd font family layered on a Western language--that cannot at 
present be successfully OCRed, or only with software that the Kirtas 
scanner does not currently use. So, yes, by all means they should scan 
away at those five schools, and, in fact, they have already scanned some 
titles in Fraktur, but just try a search in one of those books. It's 
just not bad OCR, there is no OCR, period. The anglophone angle is all 
too clear.

Dale




-- 
Dale Askey
Web Development Librarian
KSU Libraries
118 Hale Library
Manhattan, KS 66506
(785) 532-7672