Reading a journal that has no text
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ConneXions — The Interoperability Report (1987–1996) came to the collection as page scans with no text layer at all: 115 issues, 3,573 pages, unreadable to search and to everything downstream of search. The pages are 1990s desktop publishing — a wide margin column carrying side-headings, a main body column, boxed insets, mastheads, rules, and figures. Handing a whole page like that to a vision model works badly: the reading order scrambles across the columns, and figure axis labels arrive in the middle of the prose as token soup.
What worked was to infer the page’s rectangles first, transcribe each region separately at crop resolution, and reassemble in reading order with the region structure tagged. The segmentation is classical image processing rather than machine learning — ink profiles locate the column gutter, decorative rules are excluded before the gutter is found, scan borders are masked. The model is then given a vocabulary of the journal’s own era, drawn from the collection itself, as a prior: protocol names, organizations, the names of the people writing. On a controlled comparison of a single region, that prompt recovered 22% more body text than a neutral one and turned a figure from noise into a description a reader can use. The whole corpus cost about two hours across two mid-size vision-language model instances, roughly 65 seconds a page.
There is a symmetry in the material worth noticing. ConneXions documented the protocols of the young Internet and was produced with the desktop-publishing tools of its own moment — the PageMaker-and-PostScript era that put multi-column layout and margin apparatus within reach of a small trade publisher. The features that made the journal handsome in 1990 are exactly the features that defeated optical character recognition for the following three decades.
Two things in the note matter more than the method. The first is a survey of forty years of prior art that we built without and should have read first: every segmentation rule we derived empirically was already documented, with better tooling attached. The second is an audit of our own output — sixteen reviewing agents compared 791 sampled pages against their stored extractions, grading archival fidelity and asking whether a blind patron could reconstruct the page from our record alone. Of the 424 ConneXions pages sampled, 95.8% graded A or B. The audit also caught a fleet-scale defect that no aggregate statistic had surfaced: a generation ceiling was silently truncating about 7,100 dense pages mid-transcription, before their figure descriptions were emitted — deleting precisely the content the method exists to produce. All flagged pages were re-run at a higher ceiling the same day.