Scientific research is an integral part of development. Without the documented breakthroughs, many of the technologies we use today wouldn’t exist.
That’s why preservation of scientific literature is necessary for humanity’s continued development. In fact, today, we can see that many old publications are still used and cited because they are so relevant due to their foundational nature; for example, “The Theory of Sound” by Rayleigh, published in 1877 and 1888, and Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” from 1687, are still used today.
Libraries often keep original volumes in stock, but they are not allowed to be taken out. So, researchers often have to transcribe their contents by hand for proper citations.
This is more of a problem in 3rd world countries where organized digitization efforts are lagging. Thankfully, there is a very cheap alternative that anyone with access to a mobile phone can employ. In this guide, we will teach you how to use it to digitize scientific literature with ease.
OCR and How It Can Digitize Scientific Literature
The technology that can digitize text from a physical source is called OCR or Optical Character Recognition. This technology enables computers to recognize characters and symbols inside images and extract them into a digital form.
Just a few decades ago, OCR was not commercially available because personal computers weren’t strong enough to do the extraction process in a reasonable amount of time. However, today, due to cloud computing, the power of server computers is available to anyone through the internet.
So, digitizing documents has become extremely straightforward. Let’s see how it can be done.
How To Convert Physical Documents Into Digital Copies With OCR
The process is quite simple. You don’t need to install any elaborate software or even own some fancy hardware. All you need is a smartphone with a camera and an internet connection. Then you simply need to follow these instructions.
- Take pictures of all the scientific literature you need to digitize. Make sure that each page is properly captured without blurring or poor focus.
- Then open a web browser.
- Enter the following term in the search bar: “image to text converter.”
- In the search results, you will find plenty of tools. They all function in a similar way, but for simplicity’s sake, we are going to use imagetotextconverter.net.
- In the tool’s interface, you will find three options for inputting images:
- Upload — Browse your device’s storage to find the images and select them for input.
- Drag’n’drop / Copy-paste — Drag an image into the tool interface to input it. The copy-paste shortcuts also work.
- Enter URL — Enter the URL of an online image, and the tool retrieves it automatically.
- Choose whichever option seems most convenient to you.
- You can enter up to five images at once, and each image can be 4 MB or smaller. This makes the digitization faster.
- Once all images are entered, press the “Convert to text” button. The tool will start processing the image, and your output will be provided in a few seconds.
- The output of each image will be shown against it. You can copy, edit, or download it as you like.
And that’s how the physical document is digitized. Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? However, the deal isn’t done yet. Run of the mill image to text converters cannot maintain the formatting of tables and charts. So, you have to edit those yourself.
If the literature was too old, then its ink could have faded, and that can result in incorrect recognition. You will have to read the extracted text to check for errors and fix such mistakes. Luckily, grammar checkers can make that task easier and faster.
All you have to do is run the content through a grammar checker and then cross-reference the mistakes against the original images. In total, the process should take a few hours at most, whereas before, researchers had to endure grueling days of manual transcription.
Conclusion
So, there you have it — the simple and accessible way of digitizing scientific literature. This way, researchers can create a personal copy that they can reuse for future papers with ease.
In most developed countries, this problem (digitizing scientific literature) is nonexistent due to massive projects dedicated to safeguarding literature. So, you can always find a digital copy of the literature you need. But if you can’t, then this is an easy way of obtaining it.
