Air Force Award Index Cards Here in the Preservation Program at St. Louis, we are making access happ
Air Force Award Index Cards Here in the Preservation Program at St. Louis, we are making access happen!In our Reformatting Lab, we are digitizing Air Force Award Cards and extracting the text content to build a searchable database of awards. There are a number of types of awards. Three examples of the approximately 700,000 cards that are being digitized are included in this post. These cards go back before the digital age, to the 1940’s, when typewriters were used almost as much as computers are today. The abbreviations, different paper color and inks, and various typefaces from this previous era are presenting a challenge for OCR (optical character recognition) software to accurately read them. Fortunately, Preservation is co-located with the National Personnel Records Center (where most of our military veterans’ records are housed) whose staff are veterans themselves. They have been able to aid in such things as the interpretation process, distinguish occupational codes from service codes and temporary duty stations from official headquarters etc. A card alone is proof of a veteran’s military service.The digitization project will allow the information on the Air Force Award Cards to be readily accessible and and also protect the cards from further handling. Consequently, it is important to get it right! -- source link