The following News Release was written by DCL staff:
FRESH MEADOWS, N.Y., March 24 /PRNewswire/ – Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. (DCL), providing conversion services and software to publishers, industry, government, libraries and documentation developers, has announced the completion of several conversion projects for Accessible Archives, Inc., a publisher of electronic full-text searchable historical databases of 18th and 19th century American newspapers, periodicals and county histories.
The South Carolina Gazette, South Carolina’s first successful newspaper, was published between 1732 and 1780. Parts I and II of the digitized version covering 1732-1751 already were mounted. Keying text from images digitized from microfilm DCL created a fully XML-tagged searchable file for Parts III, IV and V, 1752-1780.
Published primarily between 1870 and 1900, the large county volumes comprising the American County Histories collection form the cornerstone of local historical and genealogical research. DCL cleaned up the OCRed Word files that comprise the text of the New York portion of the collection, re-sized the illustrations to compatible dimensions and relocated the footnotes to the end of each chapter.
DCL also created MARC records for all seven of Accessible Archives‘ databases including African American Newspapers, The Civil War, The Liberator, Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Pennsylvania Gazette. These records allow the searcher to identify each individual publication within the collections in greater depth, such access identification providing a basis for expanding wider metadata.
Tom Nagy, Accessible Archives COO, reviewed the projects: “The South Carolina Gazette images were only fair as is typical when utilizing old microfilm. We were extremely pleased with the accuracy of the files DCL created from them. We were equally impressed by DCL’s work on American County Histories as these types of old volumes do not lend themselves well to highly accurate OCRing. We certainly will continue to use their services as we expand our offerings.”
Mark Gross, president of DCL responded, “We appreciated the opportunity to work with these historical collections. More than 25 years of experience in the data conversion field has given us the ability to deal with less than ideal files and to produce clean and accurate data as a matter of course. We are looking forward to working on future projects for Accessible Archives.”
About Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc.
Founded in 1981, Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. converts and organizes content to create electronic documents, populate databases and publish on the web, sustaining long — term strategic relationships with its clients preparing for tomorrow’s technology. DCL operates with facilities on four continents, providing support services for high-volume data-entry and data-processing using its real-time web-accessible process control software. DCL converts from any format to any format, and has processed more than a quarter of a billion pages.
