Benefits:
This course enables the attendee to:

• Understand the techniques and outcomes that are available to analyze digitized documents.
• Be able to describe the types of information that can be extracted from digitized documents.
• Have information to help make decisions during the preparation steps leading to digitization.

Course Description:
This course targets people involved with archiving document collections.  When archiving documents, digitization should only be the first step. This course presents an overview of document analysis techniques and examples of what is possible to make the content in a digitized document collection available for analysis. The focus is on outcomes instead of the technical details of the current methods, so a technical background is not needed.

Topics include text recognition (including machine print, handprint, and handwriting in many scripts); similarity and duplicate detection; text analysis (including search, information retrieval, document summarization, and document translation); denoising and image enhancement; and handwriting comparison and signature verification.

Intended Audience:
Library collection managers, outreach coordinators, technical coordinators. An understanding of a collection and ideas about future goals for that collection are helpful. No prerequisite knoweldge is necessary.

Elisa Barney is a professor at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden which she joined after a 22 year career in the electrical & computer engineering department at Boise State University in Idaho. She is in the machine learning group of the LTU's department of computer science. She received her BS in computer science and MS and PhD in electrical, computer, and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Barney’s main research interests are image processing and machine learning. She applies these primarily to document imaging. This research has included developing models of the degradations produced during document image acquisition, analyzing the defects that can be produced by the models; handwritten Indic, cursive, and Korean script recognition; and historical document image processing. She has worked on numerous cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional, and international project teams, such as with the NATO Saclant Center in Italy and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.