Whew! 1470 pages scanned, and the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry archives are back safe and sound to the Briscoe Center for American History. Even the "extra" materials were scanned by our intrepid students, and many began the OCR process as well.
Andrea Cato, who is doing a Capstone Project on this effort, Jessica Meyerson, our TA, and myself spent Mon-Wed transporting, selecting, organizing, and distributing materials to scan to each of the students, in 3 categories this semester: transcripts, abstracts, and newspaper clippings. All of it was scanned, now the OCR process begins, as well as the checking to make sure all is in order. Plus we've had a student add the class, so some load balancing will be necessary...
A great start, but plenty of room for improvement. The tutorial needs refining/replacement, which will occur before next semester, and hopefully will coincide with a version change in the software over the summer. It needs to be shorter, and the directions on saving the project files and different formats, and why we do things this way, as well as compressing the project files, needs to be clearer and more concise.
I'm open to suggestions from students about the tutorials, from the questions I received in class I'm aware of the above problems, and certain there are more. My preference would be to come up with an anonymous survey instrument for each tutorial, they are really an ongoing usability test of sorts, and I"m well aware of their limitations, but also know their strengths. I just need to come up with a good way to get timely, anonymous, feedback, which would be ideal.
In the meantime, if you can trust me to not hold anything against you, I certainly trust that you can provide open, honest, and constructive criticisms and suggestions about the tutorials. We will be working with all manner of complex, changing, software this semester, and I will continue to rely upon tutorials to get students up to speed on various applications we need to digitize these collections.
SOD third class will be all OCR, all the time. I expect problems with the newspaper stuff, it's the experiment of the semester in text digitization.
Thanks! Q
It's really not a great idea to correct your mistakes in a linear tutorial. What is needed is a clear, orderly process, with explanations for the choices you make, and the overall process. I'm pretty sure I can shave at least 10 minutes off of this tutorial, possibly more. ABBYY is a confusing beast, and my job as an instructor is to tame it, or at least translate it into something understandable...and usable. You need to contact ABBYY at the end of the semester, negotiate licensing terms for 2011-2012, check version update plans, and revise this tutorial.
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