Additional factors influencing the approach AM took with respect to
coding included: 1) the inability of any known microcomputer-based
user-retrieval software to take advantage of SGML coding; and 2) the
multiple inconsistencies in format of the older documents, which
confirmed AM in its desire not to attempt to force the different formats
to conform to a single document-type definition (DTD) and thus create the
need for a separate DTD for each document.
The five text collections that AM has converted or is in the process of
converting include a collection of eighteenth-century broadsides, a
collection of pamphlets, two typescript document collections, and a
collection of 150 books.
ERWAY next reviewed the results of AM's experience with rekeying, noting
again that because the bulk of AM's materials are historical, the quality
of the text often does not lend itself to OCR. While non-English
speakers are less likely to guess or elaborate or correct typos in the
original text, they are also less able to infer what we would; they also
are nearly incapable of converting handwritten text. Another
disadvantage of working with overseas keyers is that they are much less
likely to telephone with questions, especially on the coding, with the
result that they develop their own rules as they encounter new
situations.
Government contracting procedures and time frames posed a major challenge
to performing the conversion. Many service bureaus are not accustomed to
retaining the image, even if they perform OCR. Thus, questions of image
format and storage media were somewhat novel to many of them. ERWAY also
remarked other problems in dealing with service bureaus, for example,
their inability to perform text conversion from the kind of microfilm
that LC uses for preservation purposes.
But quality control, in ERWAY's experience, was the most time-consuming
aspect of contracting out conversion. AM has been attempting to perform
a 10-percent quality review, looking at either every tenth document or
every tenth page to make certain that the service bureaus are maintaining
99.95 percent accuracy. But even if they are complying with the
requirement for accuracy, finding errors produces a desire to correct
them and, in turn, to clean up the whole collection, which defeats the
purpose to some extent. Even a double entry requires a
character-by-character comparison to the original to meet the accuracy
requirement. LC is not accustomed to publish imperfect texts, which
makes attempting to deal with the industry standard an emotionally
fraught issue for AM. As was mentioned in the previous day's discussion,
going from 99.95 to 99.99 percent accuracy usually doubles costs and
means a third keying or another complete run-through of the text.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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