Announcing 15,000 Old Hebrew Books, OCR’ed by Ligature®, and Searchable Online with dtSearch®

BETHESDA, MD (November 28th, 2006) The Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of old Hebrew texts, dtSearch Corp., the manufacturer of the dtSearch product line, and Ligature Ltd., the manufacturer of multilingual OCR products, announce that over 15,000 old Hebrew books and other works of Judaica are freely available and fully searchable (including in the original Hebrew) online at the Society’s website, www.hebrewbooks.org.

Over the past seven years, the Society has scanned more than 15,000 volumes of rare and out-of-print works, which were in danger of being lost, destroyed or simply disintegrating due to the passage of time. The collection began with 2,000 works of American rabbis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Recent additions have expanded the scope of the collection to include the broad range of Jewish tradition, law and custom, including commentaries, legal analysis and rabbinic journals published in Hebrew, English and Yiddish, by Jewish scholars all over the world. The now over 15,000 volumes are publicly available on the web site of the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books at www.hebrewbooks.org.

The Society used Ligature's Hebrew OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technologies to digitize the scanned books. Most of the books were recognized by Ligature's Omnifont recognition engine. Other books printed with Rashi font were recognized by Ligature's trained fonts engine. In addition to Hebrew, Ligature’s OCR engine supports English and a wide variety of other European languages.

For searching within this mixed-language Hebrew, Yiddish and English document collection, including WYSWYG hit-highlighted display of PDF documents, the Society has added the dtSearch Engine for Win & .NET. The dtSearch Engine can index over a terabyte of text in a single index — as well as create and simultaneously search an unlimited number of indexes. Indexed search time is typically less than a second, even across terabytes of data.

The dtSearch Engine supports all popular file formats, and provides over two dozen search options. Unicode support in the dtSearch Engine automatically searches not only English text, but also non-English languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish. After a search, the dtSearch Engine can display retrieved web-based documents such as scanned and OCR’ed PDFs with all links and images intact, along with highlighted hits. The dtSearch Engine supports distributed or federated searching across multiple data sources, and includes access to dtSearch’s built-in web Spider.

“Hebrewbooks.org was founded in order to preserve and make accessible old Hebrew books and other sacred sephorim. Ligature gave us the OCR software we needed to work with our multilingual collection. Thanks to technology from dtSearch, the public can now instantly search these books from our site. Through dtSearch, we can display the full image (PDF) of these works, and dtSearch will jump straight to the highlighted hits in the full image of the texts, including all graphics and even handwritten annotated notes.”

“Ligature is proud to participate in such an exceptional project,” said Giora Shimoni, Director of Marketing & Sales for Ligature. “These books are valuable treasures, and we are thrilled we could help make them searchable so people could better utilize them.”

“dtSearch very much welcomes the contribution to scholarship represented by the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books and www.hebrewbooks.org,” said Kate Tretter, Vice President of Marketing for dtSearch. “The work that the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books has continued to do in preserving and making available these old texts is impressive.”

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About the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, www.hebrewbooks.org
Hebrewbooks.org was founded in order to preserve old Hebrew books and related scholarship that are out of print and/or circulation. Hebrew Books.org is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Please visit www.hebrewbooks.org to view, search and print the entire collection of books from the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books.

About Ligature, www.ligatureltd.com
A world leader in multilingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies, Ligature develops, markets and supports a variety of OCR applications. In addition to end-user products, Ligature offers an SDK designed for VARs, systems integrators and software developers who seek an advanced, high-performance OCR engine. Ligature is wholly-owned by Wizcom Technologies, www.quicktionary.com, a world leader in providing tools and products for enabling and improving reading related activities. Wizcom Technologies is listed on the Frankfurt Prime Standard: WZM, WKN: 915 856.

About dtSearch, www.dtsearch.com
The Smart Choice for Text Retrieval® since 1991, dtSearch offers 20+ years of experience in text search and retrieval. The dtSearch product line includes enterprise and developer text retrieval products, meeting some of the largest-capacity text retrieval needs in the world. dtSearch products have received multiple awards and hundreds of excellent press reviews and case studies. The company also has distributors worldwide, with coverage on six continents.