The Internet library of early journals

A brief overview is provided of the different approaches available for the digitisation of library materials, which indicates the benefits and shortcomings associated with these techniques. It is from this perspective that the reader is introduced to the relatively new rationale behind the Internet Library of Early Journals which is mounting material drawn from six 18th and 19th century journal titles. A large corpus of material is required to attract scholars to an electronic archive of this nature and the project aims to mount 120,000 page images. Pages are scanned from both paper and microfilm originals; the paper volumes using a Minolta PS3000P overhead scanner and the microfilm from a Meckel MX500XL‐G. The requirement for high volume, high throughput, low cost production of images excludes labour‐intensive operations and the images are simply OCRed without manual correction. An Excalibur EFS database is used to provide full text fuzzy searching of the uncorrected OCRed text. The project has just started full production and the author discusses the findings so far.