The Thurgood Marshall Law Library of the University of Maryland contains over 400,000 volumes of Anglo-American legal materials as well as outstanding international and foreign law collections. Extensive collections of both primary sources and secondary materials such as treatises are available.

The library has been a selective depository for United States government documents since 1971, receiving many of the law-related documents that are published by the Government Printing Office.

Civil Rights Law is a particular area of emphasis at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library. The library collection contains a near-complete set of documents from the United States Commission on Civil Rights. These materials were used by students, faculty, and others, but until this project began, they were not available in electronic format.

Backstage Library Works' initial project with the library involved the conversion of a small sample of these documents to Adobe Acrobat format.

Per instructions from the library, Backstage Library Works removed the bindings from these documents and scanned them at 400 dpi (bi-tonal, dithered) using a sheet-fed scanner. The resulting uncompressed TIFF images were then processed by an OCR engine and converted to text.

Linking the converted text to the scanned images in Adobe PDF format re-created the sequential format of the printed materials, providing readers with a digital view of the original pages and allowing full-text searching of the documents.

In addition to the text conversion, Backstage created bookmarks to match the table of contents and thumbnail images to aid navigation. Finally, a color scan of each document's cover was processed, and Dublin Core metadata was created for each piece. OCR accuracy for the project, which included level one editing, was measured at 99.97% (character level).

For more information, contact us, or get in touch with:

Bill Sleeman, Assistant Director for Technical Services

Thurgood Marshall Law Library
The University of Maryland School of Law
501 West Fayette Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201

(410) 706-0783
bsleeman@law.umaryland.edu
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/index.asp


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