SELECTION CRITERIA FOR A DOCUMENT IMAGE-PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR THE ELINOR ELECTRONIC LIBRARY PROJECT

The Information Centre at De Montfort University Milton Keynes is carr ying out a three year research project known as the ELINOR Electronic Library project, which will work towards the creation of a large, inde xed collection of electronic texts and images accessible to the studen ts and staff via desktop workstations. The pilot phase will build on t he existing information network and use the latest document image proc essing (DIP) and text retrieval technologies to set up a central and s ecure location for the data. At this stage of the project, the recomme nded course texts are not available in electronic formats, so the prio rity was to assess the suitability of a DIP system for converting prin ted works into machine-readable text and image files. Each electronic document will contain a searchable table of contents, abstract, back-o f-the-book index data, and, appended to this information will be a fol der of image pages. This paper outlines the investigative stages in ev aluating and selecting a DIP system, and finally, covers the shortcomi ngs of using a commercial DIP system for electronic libraries.