Although AM has learned much from its experiences with various collections and various service bureaus, ERWAY concluded pessimistically that no breakthrough has been achieved. Incremental improvements have occurred in some of the OCR technology, some of the processes, and some of the standards acceptances, which, though they may lead to somewhat lower costs, do not offer much encouragement to many people who are anxiously awaiting the day that the entire contents of LC are available on-line. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ZIDAR * Several answers to why one attempts to perform full-text conversion * Per page cost of performing OCR * Typical problems encountered during editing * Editing poor copy OCR vs. rekeying * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Judith ZIDAR, coordinator, National Agricultural Text Digitizing Program (NATDP), National Agricultural Library (NAL), offered several answers to the question of why one attempts to perform full-text conversion: 1) Text in an image can be read by a human but not by a computer, so of course it is not searchable and there is not much one can do with it. 2) Some material simply requires word-level access. For instance, the legal profession insists on full-text access to its material; with taxonomic or geographic material, which entails numerous names, one virtually requires word-level access. 3) Full text permits rapid browsing and searching, something that cannot be achieved in an image with today's technology. 4) Text stored as ASCII and delivered in ASCII is standardized and highly portable. 5) People just want full-text searching, even those who do not know how to do it. NAL, for the most part, is performing OCR at an actual cost per average-size page of approximately $7. NAL scans the page to create the electronic image and passes it through the OCR device. ZIDAR next rehearsed several typical problems encountered during editing. Praising the celerity of her student workers, ZIDAR observed that editing requires approximately five to ten minutes per page, assuming that there are no large tables to audit. Confusion among the three characters I, 1, and l, constitutes perhaps the most common problem encountered. Zeroes and O's also are frequently confused. Double M's create a particular problem, even on clean pages. They are so wide in most fonts that they touch, and the system simply cannot tell where one letter ends and the other begins. Complex page formats occasionally fail to columnate properly, which entails rescanning as though one were working with a single column, entering the ASCII, and decolumnating for better searching. With proportionally spaced text, OCR can have difficulty discerning what is a space and what are merely spaces between letters, as opposed to spaces between words, and therefore will merge text or break up words where it should not.