Hello K. Zdepski,

This feature is still on the roadmap as one of the top ideas. Every time we plan a release, the product team takes a look at the top ideas that would have the most impact on the majority as well as enhancements that are needed to maintain integrations. As a result, I can't quite provide an accurate timeline at this time. If you'd like to see this feature in the next release, I recommend sharing the idea with colleagues to help boost this idea to the top.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please let me know.

Thanks,
Sara Juel

Is there any sense of where this is in the timeline? I see that the last update was that it would be part of the 9.2 release, but we're past that and this is still in the "Future Release" category.

Many online courses require that all documents provided by the library, including document delivery, borrowed/scanned materials from other libraries, and course reserves, be OCR compliant. Individual users have reader technology that also requires OCR compliant documents. Please escalate this development. Sarah's note below indicates it will be part of 9.2, but the website doesn't show this feature as part of that release.

Thanks, Sara, and all the folks at Atlas for making this happen! This is terrific news.

Perhaps the solution might be to reverse the process -- the received PDFs were run in some kind of OCR program after the ILLiad server has received the document, but before being finally upload to the patron.

This would, however, only address accessibility for your home patrons, not for the supplying library providing a PDF to a non-ILLiad library.

Not being in IT I'm not sure whether ILLiad would be be able to have another transmission program (e.g., via OCLC AE if file size limit is higher or some other file drop service) to automatically switch to using if the file size is too large for Odyssey to handle, or to send to non-ILLIad libraries.

Probably would ideally need the OCR accessibility solution addressed on both sending and receiving documents.

I am going to offer a NEGATIVE viewpoint to putting OCR into ILLiad. I recently scanned 90 pages for a request, it became a 13 MB PDF. No big deal. When I ran character recognition on it in Adobe Acrobat, the file size ballooned to 85 MEG! BIG DEAL! Needless to say I transmitted the file without character recognition and advised the recipient that if they wanted to run it, this is what they could expect.

My previous career was over 3 decades in IT. Lots of IT departments put a quota on how big email attachments can be. This could be a big problem! I think it would be better to leave it in the hands of either the ILL tech or even the ILL requester. At our uni, and admittedly this is not true of all, we are installing the full Adobe Suite pretty much everywhere.

So because of file size issues, being an IT guy, I would conditionally be opposed to this idea. If it is implemented, I would say it would require a lot of education. There's a huge risk of REALLY offending the IT department and blowing out email server hard drive space!

Because of the space issue, have the document delivery people do the OCR and either burn it on a CD or have the requester bring in a flash drive for the copy if it's too big to email, or set up a Dropbox or equiv system. Use CD-RW and encourage reuse if you like.

And I'll even identify myself and not be an anonymouse.

This is one of our most desired needs for ILLiad.

This has become a legal accessibility requirement for our university system to be in compliance with ADA regulations. Highly desirable upgrade for ILLiad!

It seems there is a desire for OCR documents. It would be great if we could include this in ILLiad

This would make things so much easier...make it so!

Since a good number of libraries are now using Tipasa, having ILLiad OCR the pdf before sending through Odyssey or Article Exchange would be great.

This is a priority on our campus, thanks!

I see this as a high priority enhancement to better serve a broader group of patrons. Thanks you!

This is a very important functionality to have in our system asap. We need to be conscientious and keep up with the times and technological tools available to meet user’s needs. On the one hand, an enhancement like this will positively target a group of patrons that, in many cases, have more difficulties to fulfill academic needs due the lack of good patron-oriented services—this is actually shocking to see. On the other hand, it will benefit users in general by providing a rich and robust product suitable to the times we live in. It will also save staff time during processing. Our mission is to share and provide access to information and knowledge to our patrons and "patrons" means everybody.

Please add in this functionality. We have an increasing number of students registering with our student disability services office and we have a workflow outside of ILLiad to accommodate these patrons which is terribly inefficient. Plus there are users not with an official disability that really benefit from having accessible PDFs and we cannot deliver that to them.

We have discussed adding OCR to our scanning processing multiple times, but lack the staff-power to make it so with our current systems. Adding OCR capabilities to Odyssey would be absolutely game-changing in terms of customer service and accessibility.

I would also like to see OCR processing added to Odyssey.

We too would like to have OCR enhancement.

I agree make OCR available.