[thelist] Offshore Outsourcing

[Marcia Welter]

Mind you, I'm coming from a point of technical ignorance on this, but
there's some vague stirring of recognition beginning to lurk with this
issue. It's got something to do with Google's ability for indexing PDF
documents, both in their regular SERPs and in their catalogs.

To do that, wouldn't Google have to be able to parse the PDF documents? And
if they can be parsed, wouldn't there be some technology possible to render
a conversion to HTML?

Marcia

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Keith
> Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 8:46 PM
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: [thelist] Offshore Outsourcing
>
>
>
>
> 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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