Why can a scanned word be visible but unsearchable?
A scan records the appearance of a page. Optical character recognition adds a text representation that a search system can use, but the recognized letters may be wrong. A person can therefore see a word in the image that an exact text search fails to find.
Questions you could explore
- What should a researcher check after a search returns no result?
Start reading
- Library of Congress, The SignalMaking Scanned Content Accessible Using Full-text Search and OCR
The Library of Congress explains scans, OCR text, recognition errors, and links back to page images.
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