Issues faced in digitally re-purposing printed archival material

The Seeing Ear On-Line Library (http://www.seeingear.org) is the first general on-line library in the UK and has been providing books in an electronic format to EU users for more than 5 yr. While this provision has been within the context of print-disability, the challenges that the Library has faced and is facing are common to everyone re-purposing printed archival material. Key issues faced by anyone contemplating such a project are the choices of hardware and software, error rates and reduction, feature analysis and extraction, and archival (meta)format. This paper presents an approach to these questions to facilitate the on-line presentation of popular climatological material. This work was supported by the Big Lottery Fund UK.