Traditional libraries contain an enormous amount of handwritten historical documents that they would like to make available electronically on the Internet or on digital media.
However, such large collections can only be accessed efficiently if a searchable or browsable index exists, just like in the back of a book. The current state-of-the-art approach
to this task is to manually create an index for the collection.
Since manual indexing is expensive, automation is desirable in order to reduce costs.