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Many libraries and archives maintain collections of research documents, such as administrative records, with paper-based formats that limit the documents' access to in-person use. Digitization transforms paper-based collections into more accessible and analyzable formats. As collections are digitized, there is an opportunity to incorporate deep learning techniques, such as Document Image Analysis (DIA), into workflows to increase the usability of information extracted from archival documents. This paper describes the authors' approach using digital scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and deep learning to create a digital archive of administrative records related to the mortgage guarantee program of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill.

The authors used a collection of 25,744 semi-structured paper-based records from the administration of G.I. Bill Mortgages from 1946 to 1954 to develop a digitization and processing workflow. These records include the name and city of the mortgagor, the amount of the mortgage, the location of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation agent, one or more identification numbers and the name and location of the bank handling the loan. The authors extracted structured information from these scanned historical records in order to create a tabular data file and link them to other authoritative individual-level data sources.

The authors compared the flexible character accuracy of five OCR methods. The authors then compared the character error rate (CER) of three text extraction approaches (regular expressions, DIA and named entity recognition (NER)). The authors were able to obtain the highest quality structured text output using DIA with the Layout Parser toolkit by post-processing with regular expressions. Through this project, the authors demonstrate how DIA can improve the digitization of administrative records to automatically produce a structured data resource for researchers and the public.

The authors' workflow is readily transferable to other archival digitization projects. Through the use of digital scanning, OCR and DIA processes, the authors created the first digital microdata file of administrative records related to the G.I. Bill mortgage guarantee program available to researchers and the general public. These records offer research insights into the lives of veterans who benefited from loans, the impacts on the communities built by the loans and the institutions that implemented them.

This article sets out to show how principles and questions about method that underlie a way of interpreting the discipline of conservation and restoration can find results in research and studies, aiming at achieving even conscious reuse process. The occasion is the very recent research performed on the former Church of Saints Gerolamo and Francesco Saverio in Genoa, Italy, the Jesuit church annexed to the 17th-century College of the order. It is a small Baroque jewel in the heart of the ancient city, former University Library and actually abandoned, forgotten for years, inaccessible and awaiting a new use.

The two-year work carried out on the monumental building was conducted according to a study and research methodology developed and refined over the years within the activities of the School of Specialisation in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. It is a multidisciplinary and rigorous approach, which aims to train high-level professionals, up-to-date and aware of the multiple problems that interventions on existing buildings, especially of a monumental nature, involve.

The biennal study has been carried out within the activities of the Post-Graduate Programme in Architectural Heritage and Landscape of the University of Genoa. The work methodology faces the challenges of the contemporary complexity, raised by the progressive broadening of the concept of cultural “heritage” and by the problems of its conservation, its active safeguard and its reuse: safety in respect of seismic risk, fire and hydro geological instability, universal accessibility – cognitive, physical and alternative – resource efficiency, comfort and savings in energy consumption, sustainability, communication and involvement of local communities and stakeholders.

The goals of the work were the following: understanding of the architectural heritage, through the correlated study of its geometries, elements and construction materials, surfaces, structures, spaces and functions; understanding of the transformations that the building has undergone over time, relating the results of historical reconstructions from indirect sources and those of direct archaeological analysis; assessment of the state of conservation of the building recognising phenomena of deterioration, damage, faults and deficits that affect materials, construction elements, systems and structures; identification of the causes and extent of damage, faults and deficits, assessing the vulnerability and level of exposure of the asset to the aggression of environmental factors and related risks; evaluation of the compatibility between the characteristics of the available spaces, the primary needs of conservation, the instance of regeneration and possible new uses; the definition of criteria and guidelines for establishing the planning of conservation, restoration and redevelopment interventions.

This paper explores how digitalization affects the academic research publication process by taking into account the perspective of management scholars. It provides an overview of the digital professional services dedicated to academic research, and investigates academics' awareness of, the impact on the publication process of, and scholars' expectations regarding digital services and software.

This explorative study adopted a qualitative approach by performing direct observations of websites regarding digital professional research services and in-depth interviews with national and international management scholars.

The multiple digital professional services dedicated to academic research enable authors to develop a scientific paper independently or with the support of professionals. The scholars' awareness regarding the digital services and software was limited, because of both the plethora of options on the market and the frequent use of the same digital tools over time. In impact terms, these tools enable scholars to improve research quality and to increase productivity. However, the negative effects led scholars to express different expectations about how they can be improved and what difficulties should be overcome to favor the publication process.

The results of this study provide suggestions both for scholars who engage in academic research and digital services and software providers.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the ongoing development of digitalization in support of the research publication process from the perspective of academics.

The aim of this paper is to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art printed Arabic text recognition systems to determine open areas for future improvements. In addition, this paper proposes a standard protocol with a set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of Arabic optical character recognition (OCR) systems to assist researchers in comparing different Arabic OCR approaches.

This paper describes an experiment to automatically evaluate four well-known Arabic OCR systems using a set of performance metrics. The evaluation experiment is conducted on a publicly available printed Arabic dataset comprising 240 text images with a variety of resolution levels, font types, font styles and font sizes.

The experimental results show that the field of character recognition for printed Arabic still requires further research to reach an efficient text recognition method for Arabic script.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that provides a comprehensive automated evaluation of Arabic OCR systems with respect to the characteristics of Arabic script and, in addition, proposes an evaluation methodology that can be used as a benchmark by researchers and therefore will contribute significantly to the enhancement of the field of Arabic script recognition.