The rapid growth of the World-Wide Web (WWW) offers digital image analysis and optical character recognition researchers a golden opportunity to bring ideas to bear on an important and timely application. To focus our discussion, we examine the needs of the Internet community for archival technical material. Some of these needs can be satisfied by posting articles now on paper in coded text form, others by posting them in facsimile image form. Most can be satisfied by a combination of both forms, but dual representation imposes certain additional requirements on document analysis. Potential sources of archival electronic documents include existing CD-ROM databases, publishers, libraries, and individual members of the Internet community. However, the cost of manual conversion of a significant portion of the pre-1980 technical material is staggering. This material will remain unavailable on the network unless certain specific optical character recognition (OCR) and document image analysis (DIA) tasks, most of which are the subject of current research, can be automated.
