What is Optical Character Recognition technology?
As used in other Gale Digital Collections, optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of converting an image of text, such as a scanned page from a book, into computer-editable text. The text in an image is not editable: the letters are made of tiny dots (pixels) that together form a picture of text. During OCR, computer software analyzes an image and converts the pictures of the characters to editable and searchable text based on the patterns of the pixels in the image. The full text of every document within The Making of the Modern World has been captured in this digital format, allowing the user cover-to-cover full-text searching of all documents within the database.
