Has anyone else considered the possibility of using a high resolution scanner to scan Microfilm and/or microfiche and then using Optical Character Recognition software to convert into text files? I have read that there are groups of people transferring St.Catherine's index onto electronic media by hand! This is going to take a huge amount of time to complete. It seems to me that if it is possible to retrieve the information by scanning and OCR, then people with the relevant equipment could do their own relatives entries at the same time as the rest of the fiche they appear on. Each person could then publish the results on their website (preferably in a webring) and pretty soon the whole thing (or any other fiche publication e.g. the IGI) would be available on-line. >From memory I'd say each fiche is 3 x 4 inches and at 9600x9600 resolution that equals around 1.2 gigabytes as an image - big but modern PCs can handle this. Conversion to text would not make a huge file. Has any body got any further thoughts on this? Joe de la Poer Power