Dorsey MicroFilm (fwd)

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Craig Kopris wrote:
> Services go beyond just putting the image on cd;
> companies will offer (for a greater fee) to clean up
> the results as well.  I avoided that "help", on the
> assumption that the cleaners wouldn't recognize old
> Jesuit handwritten diacritics as other than smudges.
> Indexing can be added, as well.

What kind of cleaning up was proposed?  I assume that there was no
question of OCR with handwriting, let alone old handwriting.  The Dorsey
materials range through handwriting - not old Jesuit, but obscure enough
at times - and typescript with interpolated handwritten characters and
diacritics.  My understanding is that OCR even with pure typescript is
also more or less infeasible, unless maybe with newer typefaces, and this
was all done in the 1880s and 1890s.  Anyway, I figured that images would
be the best that could be done, and the only question is, what quality of
image is good enough to make out the necessary details?