This article describes the process of constructing a Chinese OCR test collection and the application of this collection in an retrieval experiment. We have overcome the difficulty of obtaining past information need for retrospective data and created 30query topics that simulate real user needs. To obtain real OCR documents instead of simulated ones, we have converted 8439 full-text images into 8439 OCR test files. An evaluation of the OCR documents reveals an average of 70% of recognition accuracy. To obtain the relevant documents for each query, we invited 3 judges to examine each of 8439 images and give relevance score to each document for each topic. According to Kendall's statistical coefficient, highly consistent judgments are obtained in 20 query topics. Finally in our experiment with 12 search strategies, our results show that the retrieval effectiveness of OCR documents decrease to 70% when the recognition accuracy is about 70%.