Case Study: Jeghers Medical Index achieves a searchable digital archive of 1,000,000+ medical articles with ABBYY Recognition Server

Automated OCR Helps Pioneering Medical Archive Create Searchable Index of 1,000,000 Files

Jeghers Medical Index (JMI) is a unique archive of over one million medical journal articles dating from the 1920s to the 1990s. Much of the collection was paper stored across hundreds of folders and filing cabinets, making research slow, manual, and unsustainable as materials decayed; JMI set out to create a fully searchable online archive to preserve and improve access to seven decades of medical literature.

DocuSyst used ABBYY Recognition Server to automatically convert more than five million scanned pages (TIFFs) into compliant PDF/A-1a files, which were indexed by a Thunderstone Texis search appliance. The conversion, completed in under a year with stringent quality sampling, produced highly accurate OCR and searchable PDFs, enabling fast, comprehensive searches by author, title, subject, full text (including adjacency and wildcard searches) and was delivered on time and below budget.

Jeghers Medical Index

Lori Gawdyda

Medical Librarian