Roundup of online OCR services

With the widespread use of PDF documents in the legal community (e.g., for electronically filing documents with courts), the value of converting scanned PDF documents into searchable PDF files increases accordingly. In my appellate work, I scan many documents from the appellate record (transcripts in particular) into PDFs and then use Adobe Acrobat's OCR feature to make the PDFs searchable, a conversion that also permits me to copy and paste from the documents.

For those who don't have the full Acrobat program (or a substitute that offers an OCR capability), the November issue of WSLL @ Your Service, the Wisconsin State Law Library newsletter, links to a helpful roundup of online OCR services, some of them offering the conversion at no charge. As WSLL Electronic Services Librarian Heidi Yelk notes, however, the effectiveness of an OCR conversion depends a great deal on the quality of the scan, which, in turn, depends largely on the clarity of the scanned document.

(cgw)