Case Study: UMass Amherst achieves 1.5x faster OCR and automated resource‑sharing with Foxit PDF Compressor (Foxit Software)

UMass Amherst Improves Resource-Sharing with Foxit OCR Technology

UMass Amherst’s Interlibrary Loan (ILL) unit handles hundreds of scans monthly—about 660 transactions totaling ~19,800 pages—to serve students, faculty and other libraries. While the unit needed to deliver OCR’d PDFs as a best practice, their existing OCR software required staff to monitor slow processing on older machines, creating a time-consuming bottleneck and lowering morale.

The ILL implemented Foxit PDF Compressor to run OCR in the background, cutting processing time by about one-third (1.5x faster / ~17% more pages per hour), automatically correcting page orientation, and saving staff hundreds of hours during COVID. The change improved output quality and employee efficiency, and the library plans to expand the tool to Reserves and Special Collections.

UMass Amherst

K. Zdepski

Resource Sharing Librarian