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Wayne West, ILL at MXO

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  1. Deliver accessible PDFs via Odyssey--i.e. run PDFs through software to OCR before delivery

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    under review  ·  27 comments  ·  ILLiad Ideas  ·  Admin →
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    Wayne West, ILL at MXO commented  · 

    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.

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