Optical character scanning: A discussion of efficiency and politics

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition is shown to be significantly more expensive than keyboarding, using off-shore contractors, for entry of large amounts of text where high accuracy is required. Using large test samples in French and English, the paper indicates that OCR applications which require significant post-scan editing are labor intensive projects that can be accomplished more efficiently by keyboarding. Most OCR systems are still not capable of entering large amounts of text accurately enough to avoid an expensive editing step.