Scanning and Digitizing Resources

To use this software, email Alyssa Fahringer or datahelp@gmu.edu to make an appointment. It is available on one of the computers in the DDSS Lab.

ABBYY FineReader

Supports: 

• Transforms paper documents, PDFs, and digital photos of text into editable and searchable files
• Able to search, share, archive, and copy information from documents for reuse and quotation
• Delivers editable digital copies of documents that match the originals’ text and layouts
• Precisely re-creates the structure and formatting of multi-page documents, including text size, font styles, tables, diagrams, columns, headers, footnotes, table of contents, page numbers, and more
• Recognizes text in more than 180 language

Best used for:

• Scanning and converting documents to searchable PDF files
• Extracting portions of text

See specifications in detail. See instructions (pdf) for use. Review resources for learning more about the software and its capabilities.

If you have handwritten documents that are in need of transcription, there are AI-powered tools that can assist with this process.

• Transkribus enables you to automatically recognise text easily, edit seamlessly, collaborate effortlessly, and even train your custom AI for digitizing and interpreting historical documents of any form (Note: DDSS does not pay for access to Transkribus)
• From the Page's Handwritten Text Recognition Sandbox is a “playground” to explore how different handwritten text recognition models work with different types of documents

You will still need to verify the accuracy of the transcription. For more information on how you can use AI to recognize handwritten text, see Cameron Blevins's "A Large Language Model Walks Into an Archive...".