Legacy Resources

Scanning printed materials?

.It is common for people to have a collection of printed materials that they want to make available to others who cannot access the printed forms. Take the case of a university lecturer who has a 'reading set' that constitutes some material from books, journals, a few website pages, a few digital documents, etc.

It is common for such a lecturer to have to work on the printed materials (including printed copies of the originally digital materials) to:

• produce a photocopy of the materials and then
• submit them to some service centre that can scan them (to make them digital),
• OCR them (ie optically recognise the charaters and turn the image of text into computer text),
• correct the errors (read through checking the digital version against the original), and
• make them available electronically (publish them on a website or other wise).

Typically, this process

• takes a lot of time,
• is expensive, and
• cannot be done without expertise from the domain eg if the materials are about mathematics, or science, or music, so the person checking can effectively audit the veracity of the copy.
• Note also that digital materials are often re-digitised and marked up in some way in the process.

The following procedure is recommended instead:

• lecturer scans the printed materials only and produces either a PDF or digital text version and
• submits this digital version to the service centre that
• runs the digitised version of the materials through OCR software and
• checks them (if the lecturer can do this it saves a lot of time and money) and
• makes them available as accessible XHTML documents alongside the other, already digital, materials.

Creating New Printed Resources

When creating new resources, most people use computers and so the materials are created in digital form. The product of the work may be a printed object, so the digital files are often used to produce the printed form and discarded. If they are kept, it is not always possible to use the materials after a fairly short time because the computers have changed, the operating systems or disk systems have changed, or the software has disappeared.

For this reason, it is recommended that authors think of putting resources on the web, where they will be moved from one system to the next as time passes. To do this, the author needs only to save the resource in some standard web format. Currently, the format recommended is XHTML (HTML that is readable as XML).

To do this, the author should export the content from whatever production software was used, converting it into standard, accessible HTML or XHTML. Once this is done, it can be placed on a supported web server with some confidence that it will be transferred from one platform to another as changes in technology come about. If the material is not to be made publicly available, this can be assured by the imposition of security and authority protocols.

Materials in HTML, or XHTML format, can be read back into MS Word or other application packages at a later time for further working.

Last updated: 8 March 2002