----- Original Message ----- From: "David Rowlands" <[email protected]> To: "Dyfed List" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 8:58 PM Subject: Re: [Dyfed] NLW scanning Welsh newspapers to put online > In addition, as an example of 'crowd-sourcing', the NLA has been using > anyone who would care to register with them to correct optical character > recognition errors, and tens of millions of lines have been fixed by this > means, with some people having corrected over a million lines each! I hope > the NLW picks up on this idea, as it i unlikely OCR will read everything > correctly and this makes it difficult then to find. Users of the British Newspaper Archive please note - this website also offers readers a similar facility (a point which certain of the site's critics appear to have overlooked) and there is no additional registration required for this purpose http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/. Actually I'd have put your point even more strongly. It's not merely a case of 'unlikely' about OCR not reading everything correctly - it's an absolute certainty! There are frequently issues which are traceable to the printing of the original pages. To name just a few other possible examples, there are often problems with figures such as 3, 8 and 9, and with 'm' being confused with 'r n' (hence the well-known Lancashire town of Blackbum). AJ