Digitizing Arabic Text: Where are we today? Elizabeth A. S. Beaudin Yale University Library Project AMEEL http://www.library.yale.edu/ameel/

اللـُغَة العَرَبـِـيَّة اللغة العربية the Arabic language اللـُغَة العَرَبـِـيَّة

Victor 42n56 78w44 Alexandria 31n12, 29e54 New Haven 41n18, 72w56 Ann Arbor 42n17, 83w45 Halle 51n29, 11e58 Leiden 52n10, 4e30

Outsourcing Kirtas APT Bookscan 2400

In house … Indus 5002 Book Scanner

Processing (Image enhancement) after before

Sakhr vs. 9 Interface

Sakhr -- Increasing accuracy

VERUS vs. 2 – interface

VERUS – increasing accuracy

comparison of features and uses Sakhr Character by character Font libraries Output choices: Unicode text, proprietary, html Learning approach to improving accuracy Use of dongle for copyright Handles batch processing well Desktop and SDK versions VERUS Word by word Custom dictionary Output choices: searchable PDF or UTF-8 text Good with degraded documents Use of dongle to track quantity Handles mix of languages better API version for customization

Accuracy? Averages Conditions Improvement Decisions

Software suite Scanning: proprietary to Indus and Kirtas Digitization Workflow Scanning: proprietary to Indus and Kirtas Processing: PhotoShop, ScanFix, ACDSee, Unifier, SuperEdi OCR: Sakhr OCR-Gold and font libraries, VERUS v2 Staging and Archiving: ACDSee, customized scripts Workflow control: MS Access, customized scripts Repository Development Fedora Repository Framework, PHP, MySQL, REST, Java

FEDORA framework Indexed and searchable in Arabic Full Text repository FEDORA framework Indexed and searchable in Arabic http://oacistest.library.yale.edu:8080/fedoragsearch/restAmeel

http://www.library.yale.edu/ameel/