Subject: Digitizing text From: StosselAtl@aol.com Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 10:10:45 -0400

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Hi,

I'd like to solicit the (considerable) collective wisdom/advice of this group
about a major project we're considering undertaking here at The Atlantic
Monthly. 

We've got 138 years of back issues, about 135 of which exist only in hardcopy
form. We'd like to digitize the entire archive, so that we make it available
in various ways as a research tool or editorial product etc online (the web,
maybe) and/or on cd-rom. This is a long-term project--and as you can
imaginethere are numerous other issues we've got to resolve-- but right now
the question is, What's the fastest and cheapest way to render 150,000 pages
of Atlantics into digitized form. We figure that's about 14 person-years of
typing. Scanning might be a little faster for the issues from 1950 to the
present, but we've had little luck scanning the older issues which were
typeset so distinctively that the scanner doesn't convert them at all
accurately. It's proven faster to type them than to scan and then clean them
up.

Are there scanning consultants who could figure out how to scan the whole
thing? Should we start looking for cheap typsists? Is there any way to
execute this project without breaking our (very) small budget for this sort
of thing? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Scott Stossel
Editorial director, new media
The Atlantic Monthly

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