is it out there yet? i mean Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

well according to me the BEST OCR IS FINE READER from ABBYY...it's accuracy is really good, however it is a shareware.

another one is SimpleOCR which you get from http://www.simpleocr.com/ and the best thing about this is that it is a FREEWARE.

if you are using Linux then i have heard about Clara OCR...you can try if you have linux.

I hope this helps you!!!!

Are you looking to scan the images yourself or would they be supplied to you? I have an EPSON PERFECTION 1260 PHOTO SCANNER that has a built-in OCR that works great! & It wasn't too expensive around $100 I think, but that was a while ago.

For images that have already been scanned I use an old version of Corel 7, that had a built-in OCR program. I believe the newer versions of Corel don't have this built-in. Again, this works great for me as long as the image isn't too degraded.

I just thought I'd mention these because some people don't realize what software comes bundled with their scanners nowadays. The Corel 7 program would probably be harder to find however since it is so old!