Rescuing Legacy Data: Using Optical Character Recognition Technologies to Make Airline Consumer Data Accessible

This poster highlights efforts to rescue and make accessible the U.S. Department of Transportation Air Travel Consumer Report data tables. This data has been previously made available as PDF documents or physical print documents that include data tables. These data tables are now being extracted and converted into an accessible tabular format for publication on NTL's Repository, ROSA P. Using ABBYY FineReader PDF software, this project transforms and rescues PDF-locked data tables into machine-readable formats, ensuring greater accessibility and usability for researchers and the public. This poster will not only cover how to achieve this goal of preservation using ABBYY FineReader PDF software, but it will also provide an accessible roadmap that can be repurposed for other projects and other repositories. Through rescue efforts such as these, other legacy data projects can be executed efficiently by data professionals.