[thelist] Offshore Outsourcing

Keith cache at dowebscentral.com
Tue May 14 22:44:01 CDT 2002


I need to have 6 to 10 thousand historical newspaper articles read and
typed into plain text. These newspaper articles are 1600's to present and
are PDF images. Because of their age OCR is not an option. The PDFs are on
our server and we have a view-the-PDF-while-typing editor on the server so
that's where the work would be done. We're looking for someone offshore to
do the work. I've never done this so I'm looking for advice.

Any pointers about how to find offshore outsourcing would be helpful. Also,
any heads-ups on problems or situations to avoid, or ideas for quality
control, would be most useful. Any referrals for companies anyone might
have used should be sent to me directly offlist.

I have a friend who did something similar to this on a much smaller scale a
few years ago and his experience was that he got better accuracy and
production from a crew that did not understand the language they were
typing - the idea being that they typed characters instead of words. Some
of these old papers spell words differently than current usage and use
obsolete words. If anyone has had a similar experience, or the opposite,
I'd like to know if this is worth considering.

The offshore idea isn't mine or mine to change, so let's don't get into it.
Personally I have passionate opinions about doing it and not doing it, so I
could argue with myself about it all week....

TIA for any help


keith

cache at dowebs.com




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