Press Release

 
Announcing 15,000 Old Hebrew Books, OCR’ed and Searchable Online with dtSearch®

The Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of old Hebrew texts and dtSearch Corp., the manufacturer of the dtSearch product line announce that over 15,000 old Hebrew books and other works of Judaica are freely available and fully searchable (including in the original Hebrew) online at the Society’s website, hebrewbooks.org.

Over the past seven years, the Society has scanned more than 15,000 volumes of rare and out-of-print works, which were in danger of being lost, destroyed or simply disintegrating due to the passage of time. The collection began with 2,000 works of American rabbis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Recent additions have expanded the scope of the collection to include the broad range of Jewish tradition, law and custom, including commentaries, legal analysis and rabbinic journals published in Hebrew, English and Yiddish, by Jewish scholars all over the world. The now over 15,000 volumes are publicly available on the web site of the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books at hebrewbooks.org.

For searching within this mixed-language OCR'ed Hebrew, Yiddish and English document collection, including WYSIWYG hit-highlighted display of PDF documents, the Society has added the dtSearch Engine for Windows. The dtSearch Engine can index over a terabyte of text in a single index — as well as create and simultaneously search an unlimited number of indexes. Indexed search time is typically less than a second, even across terabytes of data.

The dtSearch Engine supports all popular file formats, and provides over two dozen search options. Unicode support in the dtSearch Engine automatically searches not only English text, but also non-English languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish. After a search, the dtSearch Engine can display retrieved web-based documents such as scanned and OCR’ed PDFs with all links and images intact, along with highlighted hits. The dtSearch Engine supports distributed or federated searching across multiple data sources, and includes access to dtSearch’s built-in web Spider.

“Hebrewbooks.org was founded in order to preserve and make accessible old Hebrew books and other sacred sephorim. Thanks to technology from dtSearch, the public can now instantly search these books from our site. Through dtSearch, we can display the full image (PDF) of these works, and dtSearch will jump straight to the highlighted hits in the full image of the texts, including all graphics and even handwritten annotated notes.”

“dtSearch very much welcomes the contribution to scholarship represented by the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books and hebrewbooks.org,” said Kate Tretter, Director of Operations for dtSearch. “The work that the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books has continued to do in preserving and making available these old texts is impressive.”

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About the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, hebrewbooks.org
Hebrewbooks.org was founded in order to preserve old Hebrew books and related scholarship that are out of print and/or circulation. Hebrew Books.org is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Please visit hebrewbooks.org to view, search and print the entire collection of books from the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books.
 
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