Paper to Screen: Processing Historical Scans in the ADS

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and solutions involved in processing and digitizing historical observatory publications for inclusion in the NASA Astrophysics Data System, enhancing searchability of scanned historical literature.

Contribution

It introduces methods to handle unpaginated and bibliographically incomplete scanned pages for improved digital archiving and search functions.

Findings

Developed techniques for processing unpaginated scans

Enhanced metadata extraction for historical documents

Improved searchability of scanned observatory reports

Abstract

The NASA Astrophysics Data System in conjunction with the Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is working on a project to microfilm historical observatory publications. The microfilm is then scanned for inclusion in the ADS. The ADS currently contains over 700,000 scanned pages of volumes of historical literature. Many of these volumes lack clear pagination or other bibliographic data that are necessary to take advantage of the searching capabilities of the ADS. This paper will address some of the interesting challenges that needed to be resolved during the processing of the Observatory Reports included in the ADS.