Case Study: Using Perl and CGI Scripts to Automate a Quality Control Workflow for Scanned Congressional Documents

The Law Library Digitization Project of the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, developed a series of scripts in Perl and CGI that take advantage of the open-source module PerlMagick to automatically review the image quality of scanned government documents. By implementing these procedures, Rutgers was able to save staff working hours for document quality control by an estimated 25% percent from the previous manual-only workflow. These scripts can be adapted by novice Perl and CGI programmers to review and manipulate large numbers of text and image files using commands available in PerlMagick and ImageMagick.