Dorsey MicroFilm

[David Costa]

I agree that digital photographing or scanning of original manuscripts is
the wave of the future. Cheaper than microfilming, and a LOT easier to use
-- just load the jpegs onto your computer and view them through any halfway
decent graphics program. You can magnify them or fiddle with the contrast
and such at will. Absolutely the way to go. Two years ago I got 24 jpegs of
a 300-year-old Pequot vocab from Yale this way, and a Jesuit archive up in
Quebec just digitally filmed a huge Illinois dictionary that I hope to
receive jpegs of shortly. I expect the practice microfilming such documents
will probably go extinct entirely someday.

I don't know of anyone who's done it, but I suspect a person could just buy
their own digital camera and a stack of diskettes and film one of these old
documents on their own, if the archive in question didn't want to be
bothered with doing it.

I too can't imagine OCR ever becoming a viable option with these old
handwritten manuscripts.

Dave

> Seems to me that scanning (to obtain image files) is the way to go. OCR, I
> believe, is out of the question. OCR software sufficient to handle this task
> would be cost prohibitive. I have a hunch the right scanner is now available
> (at the right price) but I don't know enough about what would be required in
> such equipment.