Digitizing, coding, annotating, disseminating, and preserving documents

We examine some research issues in pattern recognition and image processing that have been spurred by the needs of digital libraries. Broader -- and not only linguistic -- context must be introduced in character recognition on low-contrast, tightly-set documents because the conversion of documents to coded (searchable) form is lagging far behind conversion to image formats. At the same time, the prevalence of imaged documents over coded documents gives rise to interesting research problems in interactive annotation of document images. At the level of circulation, reformatting document images to accommodate diverse user needs remains a challenge.