Monthly Archives: July 2009

Free OCR for Google Book Search pages

05 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Ever wanted to take the hassle out of re-typing a short quote, found on Google Books? Free OCR is a simple online OCR application that might help.

To test it, I gave it a very unpromising bit of text captured from Google Books using a standard screen-capture utility — slightly skewed, slightly fuzzy, in a non-standard typeface I’m willing to bet no-one has on their system, captured as a JPG at a mere 72 dpi, and just 500 pixels wide…

ocr-test

A few seconds after uploading, it gave me this…

ADVERTISEMENT.
Tms publication of the Works of Jomv KNOx, it is
supposed, will extend to F’ive Volumes. It was thought
advisable to commence the series with his History of
the Reformation in Scotland, as the work of greatest
importance. The next voliune will thus contain the
Third and Fourth Books, which continue the History to
the year 1564; at which period his historical labeurs
maybeconsideredtoterminate. ButtheFi&hBook,
forming a sequel to the History, and published under
his name in 1644, will also be included. His Letters
and Miscellaneous Writings will be arranged in the
subsequent volumes, as nearly as possible in chronolo-
gical order; each portion being introduced by a separate
notice, respecting the manuscript or printed copies from
which they have been taken.
It may perhaps be expected that a Life of the Author
should have been prefixed to this volume. The Life of
Knox., by Ds. M‘Cms, is however a work so universally
, known, and of so much historical value, as to supersede
l any attempt that might be made for a detailed bio-

Not perfect, but not bad for such a poor-quality capture. Stand-alone OCR software usually demands a much better quality source.

The popular screenshot software HyperSnap v6 promises to do the same with its TextSnap feature, but for some unknown reason this feature just doesn’t work with Google Books or the captured image above. I suspect it can only handle text that uses system fonts.

So until we get a neat free OCR Firefox addon (which is a direction I would urge the makers of Free OCR to go in) then screenshot – save image – upload image to Free OCR is a viable and speedy workflow for OCR-ing fair-use quotes found on Google Book Search or other places that only offer plain page-scans.

Oh, and don’t bother doing this for books that are already in the public domain — since last month Google provides the full-text of these for download, and also serves it up via Google Book Search Mobile.

   ** Update: If you have Microsoft Office 2007 or higher, then I find that the included Microsoft OneNote works just as well for OCR on low-res images such as the one above. It also works well on most PDFs that don’t allow copy/paste. See the comments to this post for details.

Non non-destructive scanning

05 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Ooops!

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The man who ripped books…

“I have a sheet-fed scanner — a Fujitsu Scan Snap S510M [$350] — which works quickly. It handles about 20 sheets per minute, scanning both sides. A 200 page book takes about 5 minutes to scan. The problem is turning a bound book into sheets. I’ve been using a utility knife to cut the pages […] the knife only takes a few minutes. In less than 10 minutes I can reduce a bulky 2-3 pound book to a weightless file with all the typography, graphics and even the paper’s color preserved in a PDF.”

A better option, which means you can still sell the books afterwards. Or donate them to a library.

Or you could just run a $65 barcode scanner over the back of each book, keep them (“Books furnish a room”, etc) and then search a lot of your library via Google Books. Plus you get a record of your library for insurance purposes, in case the house burns down. Which in large sections of the American desert/scrubland is apparently a real possibility. I’d imagine it might be quite useful for scholars in repressive countries too, where one might suddenly have to flee the country without a personal library.

The hidden economics of Open Access

03 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by in Economics of Open Access

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Joseph Gelfer criticises aspects of the paper “But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access” (2009) by John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, with special focus on the value that paid editors can bring in terms of polishing manuscripts.

In the second half of the post, Gelper also points out that…

“the volunteer labor on which many OA journals … are based hides the true cost of doing business. One would expect an economist to make more of this analysis, but the fact that $0 is spent on editing an OA journal does not result in zero cost. Costs come in many shapes and forms: that hour of volunteer copyediting from our editorially skilled and willing academic comes at the cost of their employer, or family, or an hour of leisure activity. … when such [OA] mandates rely on unpaid labor, they also have the potential to erase the skills of academics and publishing professionals who may otherwise reasonably demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work … the glossing over of economic realities does no service to OA’s moral high-ground”

The other hidden long-term cost factor here is training. Professionals may have invested years of their life in training courses and self-learning, whereas volunteer OA editors are seemingly expected to “just know how to do it”. Not only are volunteer editors not paid (even in terms of workload allowances), they’re not paid to train for their role either.

Open Access: What are the economic benefits?

01 Wednesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Economics of Open Access

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Yet another new report for your holiday deckchair reading. Open Access: What are the economic benefits? A comparison of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark is by John Houghton of the Australian Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, and is published by the Danish Knowledge Exchange….

“Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles (i.e. ‘Gold OA’) might bring net system savings of around […] EUR 480 million in the UK (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity) […] a repositories and overlay-services model may well produce similar cost savings to open access publishing.”