filing hundreds of scanned pdfs?

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dialectician
Posts: 24
Joined: Fri May 08, 2009 2:24 pm

filing hundreds of scanned pdfs?

Post by dialectician »

I've decided to start digitizing (scanning and OCR-ing) a few hundred books and pamphlets that are not available in digital form (and are not yet in my Bookends database). For that purpose, it would be helpful to automate the creation of a bibliographic entry for each of the scanned pdfs.

While Bookends' Auto-complete feature is helpful, it still requires manual input of author/title keywords in the search window. A colleague told me that some bibliographic software (including, apparently, Sente) can automatically extract author/title information from a scanned and OCR'd pdf. To my knowledge, Bookends does not have that feature.

Does anyone have experience with this? Any advice on what software would be able to auto-extract this information and generate bibliographic references that I could subsequently import into Bookends?

Thanks!
Jon
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Re: filing hundreds of scanned pdfs?

Post by Jon »

I'd love to hear about this, too. I know of software that tries to extract metadata from normal pdfs (with pretty mixed results in my experience), but not scanned pdfs (which are bitmaps). Perhaps your friend was talking about metadata that can be attached to a pdf?

Jon
Sonny Software
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10084
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
Contact:

Re: filing hundreds of scanned pdfs?

Post by Jon »

I should should have added that if the pdf was OCR's well then Bookends should be able to read the text. Remember, Bookends looks for a doi. Do these pdfs have dois? If so, and Bookends isn't finding one, please send me an example and I'll take a look at it.

Jon
Sonny Software
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