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.

A particular area of emphasis at the Thurgood Marshall Law Library is Civil Rights Law. The library collection contains a near complete set of documents from the United States Commission on Civil Rights. These materials are used by students, faculty, and others, and to date have not been available in electronic format.

Backstage Library Work's 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 was able to remove the bindings from the documents and scan 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 text and page images in Adobe Acrobat format allows the benefits of full-text searching while providing the reader with a digital view of the original page. In addition to the text, Backstage Library Works created bookmarks to match the table of contents and thumbnail images to aid navigation. Finally a color scan of each document's cover was provided and Dublin Core metadata was created for later use by the library. OCR accuracy for the project, which included level one editing, was measured at 99.97% (character level).

For more information contact:
Bill Sleeman
Bibliographic Control/Government Documents Librarian
University of Maryland
Thurgood Marshall Law Library
500 West Baltimore
Baltimore, Maryland 21201
(410) 706-0783
wsleeman@umaryland.edu
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/index.asp


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