hist-brewing: Re: London and Country brewer

[Spencer W Thomas]

I would be happy to contribute whatever I can to this effort.

For my "real job" I am the technical lead on the JSTOR project
(http://www.jstor.org).  We have, to date, about 2.5 million page
images online, with full-text search capability.

Unfortunately, for now, the software part of the project is pretty
hard to export (not to mention that I don't have the IP rights to it
personally.)  Bits & pieces are exportable, however, including a
program "tif2gif" to convert high-res TIFF bitmaps to lower-res GIF
grayscale images, and the text search engine.

Our pages are all scanned at 600 DPI to provide "archival quality".
At this resolution, a typical page image, compressed with the CCITT
Fax G4 method, requires about 150Kb.  

We do not currently have significant in-house OCR (optical character
recognition) capacity, as most of this is done off-site.  We are
currently evaluating an OCR product that runs up to 5 OCR methods and
the "votes" on the result.  If we end up purchasing this, I might be
able to squeeze in some non-work pages here and there.  In fact, I
think I'll test it on some of the almost 600 pages I scanned a couple
of years back from the Wahl-Henius 1908 Handybook of American Brewing.
(See http://hubris.engin.umich.edu:8080/Wahl for GIF page images.)

=Spencer Thomas in Ann Arbor, MI        (spencer at umich.edu)

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