Document: Your Seat at the Table

Use OCR to make scanned-in memos searchable

The Your Seat at the Table documents provide a treasure trove of information supplied to the Obama-Biden transition team from lobbyists, governmental organizations, citizens and other sources. All of these documents are available in PDF format, but not of all of them appear as searchable text, which reporters would need if they were looking for specific information contained in reams of pages.

Download the following specific documents from the overall set and run them through OCR software to make the text searchable. All documents are typed, and aside from a few basic formatting challenges (italics, for example), should be a relatively easy task for most software.

• "A New Day for Women's Health at the Food and Drug Administration" - National Women's Health Network
• "Reclaiming Trade Policy for America" - Coalition For a Prosperous America
• "Waterfront Coalition Mission Statement" - Waterfront Coalition
• "Policy Proposals on the Social Security Administration" - Social Security Advisory Board

DESIRED OUTCOME: Samples from the output should match four pre-selected samples that have already been transcribed into text.

To test the accuracy of your output, first download the comparison sample file, where you'll find the locations of the selections in the documents above. Copy these selections from your results and paste them directly into a new text document. Then run "Compare Documents" (available in most word processors) using the sample file and your results file.

The OCR software's performance on this task should be judged based on how well the two documents match up.