That “Optical Character Recognition” software processes images of texts is desirable for a number of reasons, the chief among these being that of storage. Furthermore, that which is fed back to the user by the software after having been processed can be annotated. Thus if the user wishes to add notes into the text after it has been processed, they are capable of doing so and also of saving these annotated notes. One downside of the software might be exemplified were I to scan a primary source from the medieval period onto my hard-drive and then upload this onto OCR to be processed. Names like “Æthelred”/“Ethelred”, which are composed of characters no longer used in contemporary English, may confuse the software and lead to spelling mistakes. Consequentially, it might incorrectly process the text, requiring me to find every word spelt with these particular characters and insert the contemporary English Equivalent. At best to make these corrections would be a burden and time consuming. At worst, I might actually miss them and the errors may remain there.
I found Evernote indispensible to my use of OCR. However, unlike X-mind and Zotero I’m not sure whether I’ll find much use for OCR given my contemporary circumstances. Perhaps if I had a camera on my mobile phone, or got into the habit of bringing my digital camera into the library with me, I might find it more significant to my research. I understand that OCR has its uses as a piece of software for scanning texts, but to be quite honest I don’t find myself doing this very often.
If I wanted to get a particular text from a library book, considering how I am currently an MA post-grad, and get free photo-copying cards, why would I bother going to the trouble of taking photographs of text from books and uploading these photographs onto OCR on my laptop when I can just print off the text I need? Perhaps I would do it because there would be the safety of having sources saved to my computer whereas if I lost my photo-copy of a source I would have to return to the library and search for the source in question – and someone may have already checked it out leaving me to wait for its return.
My first experiment with OCR saw me feed it a document that I had already typed up by hand. Unsurprisingly, my initial reaction to the service was one of bewilderment as to what real benefit it has to offer. Considering how Times New Roman is the most standard form of text font, as the soft-ware fed back to me this document which I instructed it to process, it reproduced that which I had initially fed it in exactly the same form. I was reminded by this initial experiment of my reaction to Evernote, and how despite this service was of little use to me in my immediate circumstances, I nonetheless appreciated the potential it had to be of service to other historians. Could it have been that I was missing the bigger picture with OCR?
In a succeeding experiment with the tool I used Michael Winterbottom’s article on Gildas and Columbanus which I currently have saved as a PDF file. Perhaps if I became more accustomed to OCR, I wouldn’t find it so time consuming to have to clip captions of pages, save them, then upload them onto the software, and then paste the processed text to a Word document. Yet since I’m new to this tool, I found it difficult to get used to it. I also found the process of transferring text from the PDF to OCR time consuming for the very reason that I was only able to clip whatever caption of the text was visible on the screen. For example, on the third page (page no. 312)I was clipping, I had to clip the top and bottom halves of the page separately because Evernote couldn’t capture the entire page’s text with a single clip. 
For me this was a cause of frustration. Besides this difficulty, there was the restraint of a message I received from OCR telling me that there was a limit to the amount of text image it could process and that I’d have to wait for an hour before I could avail of the service. Luckily I received this after having completed processing Winterbottom’s article.
At the end of it, after having laboriously gone through the task of transferring the PDF to OCR and pasting it to a word document, I saw how for me the costs of the process exceeded the benefits. This is one Digital History tool I can’t see myself returning to use any time in the near future.
