========
Subject: [gweekly] LONG! Project Gutenberg Needs You!!!
From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu>
To: "Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter" <gweekly@listserv.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 15:00:13 -0400 (EDT)
This is the LONG message.
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Contents
Overview
0.
Etexts in Various Languages
1.
Copyright
2.
Scanning and Typing
3.
Proofreading
4.
FTP and WWW Sites
5.
Donations
6.
Raiders of the Lost Archives
7.
Special Requests
8.
Programming
9.
New Etexts Needing Proofreading
Followed By More Detailed Information On Most Of These Subjects
*******
0.
Etexts in Various Languages
As you may be aware, this last year we have greatly expanded our
output of Etexts in languages other than English, including:
1. English
2. Latin
3. French
4. Italian
5. German
6. Spanish
7. Chinese
8. Japanese
9. Swedish
10. Danish
11. DNA/ATGC
12. Welsh
13. Portuguese
14. Old Dutch [pre 1949]
15. Bulgarian
16. Dutch/Flemish
17. Greek* Almost ready!
18. Hebrew*
19. Old French*
20. Polish*
21 Russian*
22. Romanian*
[Those with an * are still in need of work]
1.
Copyright
Project Gutenberg will do copyright research for you if you send us
xeroxes of the title page [both sides, even if one side is blank.]
[We will do this even for people working on other eText projects.]
We need people to hunt through libraries or bookstores for editions
that we can use to legally prepare our Electronic Texts [Etexts.]
Germany, Italy and Great Britain have each extended their copyright
to "life + 70 years," as opposed to the "life +50 years" of "Berne"
copyright conventions. Residents of those areas will have to be an
extra bit careful, as a million items that used to be Public Domain
in those countries reverted to copyright status, even though a vast
majority of them are no longer for sale. This is now true for some
other countries, including France and perhaps Brazil and Portugal.
These are the latest lists I have received: [NOT authoritative]
Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Bulgaria,
Burkina Faso, Burundi, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, El Salvador,
Iceland, Japan, (South) Korea, Latvia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand,
Panama, the Philippines, Poland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad
and Tobago, and Ukraine are all "life plus 50 years" countries,
or were last I checked.) and Portugal. I have been told Turkey
should be included, can anyone verify that?
Life + 75: In Guatemala and Mexico, copyrights tend to last for the
lifetime of the author plus 75 years, with certain exceptions.
Life + 70: Poland and much of EU, and Brazil
More on the United States Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 in a
"More Detailed Information" section below.
2.
Scanning and Typing
Once we have located some proper edition[s], then our volunteers do
the books by scanning or typing them into the computer. Usually it
is the same person who does the proofreading, but not necessarily.
If you would like to help us make eTexts available in the future,
please contact the following:
Greg Newby <gbnewby@ils.unc.edu>
Brett Fishburne <william.fishburne@verizon.net>
Jim Tinsley <jtinsley@pobox.com>
with a cc: to me at hart@pobox.com
3.
Proofreading
We have a variety of ways for you to help with Project Gutenberg.
Often the only way for many of our volunteers to work on Etexts for
us is if they can ship their book to one of us, have it scanned in
and then returned to them for proofreading.
If you could do the scanning for them, it would help us immensely.
4.
FTP and WWW Sites
We would very much like to provide better access to Etext for sites
in Africa and South America, and other locales. If you know anyone
who might be able to help with this, please read this:
We are always in search of more FTP and World Wide Web sites, so an
increasing number of people can download our books without unusual,
even often fatal, delays and glitches in transmission.
If you, or someone you know, can spare a gigabyte on their servers,
please have them contact us about creating more mirror sites. This
is a particular need for countries south of the equator, where text
files are only available on one server that we know of. If you can
help us get our books into South America, Africa, and further, this
would be a great help. We have something restarted in New Zealand,
with extensions into Australia, but the load this server can handle
is probably going to be easily exhausted.
Some local research is required to find out what copyright laws and
other regulations must be satisfied to operate such servers.
5.
Donations
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South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.
Anything you can do in these states would be greatly appreciated,
since we are at this juncture, helping us get more Public Relations
coverage of our just released 4,000th Etext.
As I said, anything would be greatly appreciated. This SHOULD BE a
great time to get some PR. . .but it still appears, even though the
project has been written up probably about 200 times, that they are
going to write us up when THEY have a reason to rather than when WE
have a reason, and we feel it is now time to try to break out of an
entirely too limiting niche in the computer oriented media, and get
some more general publicity out there to the millions of people who
aren't computer oriented at all, but will would like to receive the
Etexts for education or entertainment. This is a majority of world
population centers, and we should do more to reach them.
If you have any "ins" in the press or with the corporate world, this
would be a good time to use them.
6.
Raiders of the Lost Archives
As you may be aware from several events of a month ago, and earlier,
there is a downside to having Etext archives in limited distribution
modalities, simply because if one site, or one person, or even whole
countries, change their minds about what they are going to archive--
then the whole world loses access to those files.
A good example was the loss of The Oxford Book of English Verse from
Project Bartleby. We have taken great pains to get this book, which
is undoubtedly important, back on the Net. If you want to see which
sites have lost this file, just do a Yahoo search for the book, then
count the vast number of sites that have blank entries for the book,
once it was deleted from a multiplicity of links; this is an example
of how important it is for Etexts to be posted on many sites, rather
than just one site will many links to it!!!
We need volunteers who will search the world for every possible book
and help us preserve it.
Project Gutenberg will not release any of this material until we can
do the copyright research and prove it belongs in the Public Domain.
We realize that many of our volunteers sometimes get frustrated that
we do this research, which possibly takes half our time, but it will
become more and more apparent why this is a good policy as copyright
laws become stiffer and stiffer, and world intellectual property can
be limited in greater and great ways. It is quite likely that it is
going to be some time in the next calendar year that a United States
law killing off another 20 years of public domain in the US will get
passed, to join the countries listed above, in eliminating a million
books from potentially being posted as Etexts, even though 99% are a
dead issue, out of print for decades. . . .
[It did pass. October 27, 1998 - the U.S. went from life plus 50 to
life plus 70 for works created after 1/1/78, and from 75 to 95 years
for many works published before 1978. . .but this doesn't change the
items that had already entered the public domain in the US, unlike a
reversion from public domain status to copyright status in countries
in the European Union and other locales. Thus, the US copyright for
most works still cuts in at 1923. . .and this is scheduled to stay a
cutoff date until around 2020.]
So the rule of thumb we use most is that anything pre-1923 is ok.
7.
Special Requests
We occasionally receive scanned material which could have benefitted from
more cleanup before it was sent to us. What we need is proofers with
patience to read through an etext and take out stray letters, clean up the
punctuation, and send a list of questionable lines to the person who
scanned it so they can send corrections to be inserted. This usually takes
a couple of weeks, and is a good short-term project for folks who want to
get their feet wet with Project Gutenberg.
8.
Programming
Due to the various formats in which we receive many of our Etexts,
we need some assistance in writing PERL scripts, vi scripts, or an
assortment of other scripts that will assist our proofreaders, and
our editors, in dealing with page numbers, markups, italics and an
assortment of other formatting issue that come up time to time.
Most of these are fairly trivial and can be solved with a one line
script for each of the particular situations and we just need some
people to either run the scripts we already have, or to write some
new ones from time to time when a particularly rough Etext version
arrives at our doorstep. These scripts, which take minutes to set
up, and seconds to run, can save HOURS of proofreaders' time. You
can be a BIG help just running some of these scripts for us, or in
writing or rewriting some of them on occasion.
***
More Detailed Information
1.
Copyright
Copyright Extension Is Also Happening in the United States
Since Project Gutenberg began in 1971, millions of copyrights in
the US should have expired, but are being prevented from expiring
by various political action groups.
2.
Scanning and Typing
We don't really want to get into a public recommendation about what
scanners and OCR [Optical Character Recognition] programs work best
. . .it is really the case that some do better on some books, while
others do better on other fonts, page coloration, etc.
However, we ARE willing to share our experience if you ask.
3.
Proofreading
Our official accuracy level that we try to maintain has been 99.9%,
for our first release, which is usually raised to 99.95% before the
vast majority of people ever see them, and this standard has been a
standard that has been adopted by most Etext providers, including a
new effort toward Etext by the Library of Congress and the national
libraries of Great Britain and other countries.
What we hope you realize is that any serious effort to get an Etext
to 100% accuracy should take MORE effort than to create an entirely
new Etext with an accuracy level of 99.9% to 99.95%.
While many, even most, of the Project Gutenberg Etexts are accurate
to an amazing degree, even more amazing when you compare then to an
entire world of Etexts prepared by both the scholarly or commercial
Etext enterprises, we do not feel that the additional doubling of a
more than massive effort, to possibly reduce the errors, by another
.02% perhaps, would have anywhere near the value of the preparation
of an entirely new Etext with the same amount of effort.
Nevertheless, even the most famous universities of the world have a
collection of Etexts, many of which have vastly more errors than in
our collection. This is also true of the commercial Etexts. Don't
be afraid that your efforts won't be as good as all the others, the
process of improving Project Gutenberg Etexts is never ending.
In addition, there are many volunteers who would prefer to have an
Etext or at least an author selected for them to work on. As some
of you already know, _I_ have been reluctant to choose for anyone,
not wanting to bias the formation of our collection with my choice
of what are the great books of human history.
More on:
Proofreading: We could also use people who know how to use DIFF or
Word's "compare" that point out differences between two files, even
programmers that might only be able to search our files for matched
and unmatched quotes. [Remember that when quoting many paragraphs,
each internal paragraph gets only an opening quote.]
Our proofreading is a never-ending story. . .we run spell-checkers,
and other varieties of programs, on our Etexts, and have real human
proofreaders go over them in pretty incredible detail, but we would
be remiss if we did not tell you that over 99% of the books we work
from have their own errors, and that while we catch some of those--
we undoubtedly introduce errors of our own, and even though we will
gladly keep updating our editions, ad infinitum, the odds that this
will catch ALL the errors in the near future are virtually 0%.
Therefore. . .we need you to email us when you have suggestion, and
comments, and when you find possible errors that need correction.
4.
FTP and WWW Sites
We are willing to adjust the bandwidth on various sites by adjusting
the publicity various sites receive, and also by asking our users to
only use certain sites at certain times of the day or night. So the
drain on sites volunteering to mirror Etexts should not suffer any.
Remember:
Some local research is required to find out what copyright laws and
other regulations must be satisfied to operate such servers.
5.
Donations
Because of the type of tax exempt organization that the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation falls within, it is especially
important that our financial support come from as wide a base as possible.
So far, we have not received any local, regional or national grants,
but when we do obtain such funding, it will be even more important to
maintain broad public support as well. To maintain our tax exempt status,
between 10% and 34% of our financial support must come from the public.
You are the backbone of our support.
We could barely survive otherwise.
6.
Raiders of the Lost Archives [This needs a rewrite]
This is going to be particularly evident if the raggedy performances
that are destroying 99% of the Public Domain continue by raiding the
Public Domain, taking a million works out of the Public Domain, over
a period of 20 years, and putting perhaps 1% of 1% of them back in a
print version so that those who owned the copyrights for the past 75
years and made millions from them, can make another million per year
while 99.99% of those works disappear from public access altogether.
*
Hopefully it has been worth your while to read this far. . .and you will take
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other_2001_10_25_project_gutenberg_needs_you_part_2.txt
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