30 September 2007

Maryland: Using OCR for genealogy, October 14

The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington will host Logan J. Kleinwaks on "Searching Online Historical Documents," at 1 p.m. Sunday, October 14, at Bnai Israel in Rockville, MD.

Kleinwaks will describe how to use a search engine he developed based on optical character recognition (OCR) software to search Eastern European directories, with an emphasis on how to find what you are looking for despite errors introduced by the OCR process. The OCR-based approach allows data from print sources to be made searchable very quickly, with little manual intervention. Its applications to other Jewish genealogy projects will also be discussed.

His new tool - Shoah Connect - to reunite families separated by the Shoah allows email addresses to be associated with Pages of Testimony found on Yad Vashem's website, and automatically matches people associated with same Pages.

Kleinwaks is the creator of the online tools ShoahConnect, for Page of Testimony research, and www.kalter.org/search, for searching historical business directories, as well as the general genealogy site Family Tree Registry. His broader genealogical interests include the photographic documentation of Jewish cemeteries, improving Internet access to genealogical information, and privacy.

For more information and directions, click here. Free for members; $5 for others.

No comments:

Post a Comment