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Subject: Project Gutenberg Volunteers' Newsletter, January, 1998
From: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@prairienet.org>
To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteers' List" <gutvol-l@listserv.oit.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 12:07:14 -0600 (CST)
This is the first note to the new Project Gutenberg Volunteer's List.
First let give you a whole new year's worth of thanks for your help!!
Then let me tell you how simple Project Gutenberg really is.
We post our files in such a manner that they are available all over a
whole world of sites [not that we don't need more] the next day. The
process is called "Unlimited Distribution" through which we encourage
anyone who wants to to repost out books anywhere and any way they are
willing to do so, though we do ask a royalty for commercial usage.
Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually made available in "Plain Vanilla
ASCII". . .a term we created to define these simplistic standards:
Please keep the following somewhere you can refer to it now and then.
This is the REALLY SIMPLE standards file for Project Gutenberg Etexts
1. Put a blank line between each and every paragraph. For Mac users
this means each line IS its own paragraph. For DOS and UNIX users it
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2. The only markup we use is when emphasis italics or bold are used.
Then we use CAPS for those words. If only one letter, _I_, _O_, etc.
3. Margins should be somewhere between 55 and 79 letters per line &
watch out for trailing spaces, which tend to creep in now and then.
4. Use only the same characters you would use in writing email in a
plain manner. . .higher order characters, accented characters, oe,ae
and all those should be written in the plainest possible manner so a
wider audience can be reached. We can also post other files, having
all the higher level characters for other languages and characters--
but, we would like to at least post Plain Vanilla ASCII files, too.
The only other aspect of Project Gutenberg Etexts is the header with
the legal provisions required to protect our volunteers and users of
our Etexts from intellectual property hassles and the like.
We would like it if you would put the header at the top of the Etext
files you send in, but if this is a big hassle, we can do it. These
legalisms have withstood the test of time and were written by a very
competent team of volunteer lawyers expressly for Project Gutenberg.
Some people are having trouble saving these as separate files, so it
will probably be best if I send the header separately, next message,
which you can hopefully save as a file, and import into the Etexts--
don't worry if this is too hard to do, I can do that work in 10 - 15
minutes, but I am becoming aware that I have fewer and fewer periods
of 10 - 15 minutes. Even if you can't get the headers on the files,
it would still help immensely if you could email me back the headers
with the appropriate data already filled in and I could attach them,
put in the Etext number, etc.
***
A little about Project Gutenberg.
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We have always been volunteers, including myself, though I realize a
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We have sometimes been an officially sanctioned part of a university
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However, in the midst of our gained security and respect last year a
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Here is the rate at which we have produced Etexts over the years:
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4 per month in 1993 for a yearly total of 48 and a total of 95
2 per month in 1992 for a yearly total of 25 and a total of 47
1 per month in 1991 for a yearly total of 12 and a total of 22
1 per year before that to a yearly total of 1 and a total of 10
[See 1990 index notes for a description of doing the Bible
and Shakespeare, and the combining of shorter files from a
previous numbering system into the 10 files before 1990.
You should be made aware that computers and networks were pretty
small and slow before the 90's, and that we were not encouraged,
even actively discouraged, from placing large files for download
. . .quite the opposite as today. Therefore, the first ones are
very small, and we had to originally work on Shakespeare and the
Bible as individual files for each play, poem, or book, so these
files would not overload the systems we were working on then.
***
That more or less brings you up to date and gives you a history,
somewhat abbreviated, of Project Gutenberg. You will find other
materials about Project Gutenberg on our web site: promo.net
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<beandp@primenet.com> Dianne Bean or <ccx074@ccj.coventry.ac.uk>
David Price, who are our two Directors of Production. If any of
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teams of volunteers on certain projects, that would be *GREATLY*
appreciated by Dianne, David, and myself.
Please don't hesitate to ask for more information about all this.
Thanks!
Michael
=============================================
Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Benedictine University [Illinois Benedictine]
Carnegie Mellon University Visiting Scientist
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Post Office Box 2782, Champaign IL 61825-3231
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