Non-OCR

Referring to data or documents that are not processed or recognized by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. This means the text or information within the material cannot be automatically extracted, indexed, or searched using OCR software. Such data is typically in a format that hinders machine readability, like handwritten documents, images of text, or scanned documents where the text has not been converted to an editable format. This necessitates manual handling and often involves retyping or manual data entry.

Non-OCR meaning with examples

• The museum's collection contained numerous ancient scrolls that were non-OCR, meaning scholars had to painstakingly transcribe the text by hand before any analysis could begin. This slow process contrasted sharply with modern libraries where OCR scans enabled quick text extraction and search capabilities across vast datasets. Digitization and OCR-ability weren't considered in the past.
• The company's archive was a mixture of scanned invoices. The earlier ones were non-OCR, appearing as image files and requiring manual data entry for accounting purposes. The switch to a modern document management system, featuring advanced OCR, significantly streamlined operations, reducing processing time, and improving accuracy of financial data. It modernized data accessibility greatly.
• Many old photographs or images of newspaper articles shared online are inherently non-OCR. Even if text appears, the image format doesn't allow computers to 'read' and index words and paragraphs, preventing easy access to the information contained. The advent of OCR helps make it easier for news sources to become searchable, and to share information online quicker, saving time and reducing the need for manual work.
• Legal documents, like signed contracts in PDF format, may be non-OCR if they are simply image files of the original document. This means that to find specific terms, a human needs to search visually, significantly slowing down the process when compared to an editable text file that OCR converts. It provides the ability to create searchable document indexes.