A thesis or dissertation is one type of scholarly work that shows a student pursuing higher education and has successfully met the partial requirement of a degree. An electronic thesis or dissertation can be found from either a university’s electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) digital library or ProQuest (a third party ETD repository). ETDs contain lots of rich metadata that can be used for searching ETDs from the repository. However, not all ETD metadata are available. Therefore, it is necessary to extract metadata from scholarly ETDs. Also, extracting metadata could be challenging, mainly when it is found as scanned academic ETDs. Although many open-source tools exhibit satisfying performance in certain types of documents, experiments indicate that they tend to produce unacceptable errors or fail on scanned ETDs. In this blog post, I introduce one of the widely used optical character recognition (OCR) tools called tesseract-OCR and show how tesseract-OCR performs on scanned ETDs. Read More..