Heuristics for identification of bibliographic elements from title pages

This paper presents a methodology for automatic identification of bibliographic data elements from the title pages of books. Also enumerates the various steps like scanning the title pages, running optical character recognition (OCR) software, generating HTML files out of title pages and applying heuristics to identify the bibliographic data elements. Much of the paper deals with the surveys undertaken to analyze the characteristics of various bibliographic descriptive elements like title, author, publisher and other elements. The first survey deals with the sequence of the bibliographic data in the title pages. The second survey deals with the font size, font type and the proximity of each bibliographic element on the title pages. The survey results are then used to develop heuristics, in order to develop a rule‐based expert system which can identify the bibliographic elements on the title pages. The results of the system are presented, along with problems encountered.