Challenges for the Engineering Drawing Lehigh Steel Collection

International audienceThe Lehigh Steel Collection (LSC) is an extremely large, heterogeneous set of documents dating from the 1960's through the 1990's. It was retrieved by Lehigh University after it acquired research facilities from Bethlehem Steel, a now-bankrupt company that was once the second-largest steel producer and the largest shipbuilder in the United States. The documents account for and describe research and development activities that were conducted on site, and consist of a very wide range of technical documentation, handwritten notes and memos, annotated printed documents, etc. This paper addresses only a sub-part of this collection: the approximately 4000 engineering drawings and blueprints that were retrieved. The challenge resides essentially in the fact that these documents come in different sizes and shapes, in a wide variety of conservation and degradation stages, and more importantly in bulk, and without ground-truth. Making them available to the research community through digitization is one step the good direction, the question now is what to do with them. This paper tries to lay down some first basic stepping stones for enhancing the documents' meta-data and annotations