Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Technology that converts the image of text in a scanned document into machine-readable characters, making digitized records searchable and reusable.
Optical character recognition (OCR) converts the image of text in a scanned document into actual, machine-readable characters. Without it, a scan is just a picture — you can’t search it, copy from it, or have software process it. OCR is what makes digitized records genuinely usable.
OCR enables full-text search, faster review for FOIA and e-discovery, accessibility (screen readers), and downstream automation like auto-classification. It’s commonly embedded as a hidden text layer in a searchable PDF/A so the page still looks like the original while being searchable. Its limits matter: accuracy depends on scan quality, fonts, and handwriting, so good imaging improves OCR — and the authoritative record is usually the image, with OCR text as a searchable (and possibly imperfect) layer rather than a replacement.