The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter 17th September 2003 eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971 Part 2 In this week's Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter: 1) Editorial 2) News Distributed Proofreaders Update Radio Gutenberg Update 3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features Notes from Posted 4) Mailing list information Editorial Hello, Another small special this week looking at the multi-media aspects of PG. The idea for this newsletter came from a discussion on one of our volunteer lists. 'Let's do the movies' they said. The first choice - well, Gali has kindly supplied a feature below. Mike Eschman also gives us his reasons for starting Radio Gutenberg, and Greg Newby, along with his plea for more help with music, gives us an update on what donations are for when it comes to Project Gutenberg. Happy reading, Alice send email to the newsletter editor at: news@pglaf.org Founding editor: Michael Hart hart@beryl.ils.edu Newsletter editor: Alice Wood news@pglaf.org Project Gutenberg CEO: Greg Newby gbnewby@pglaf.org Project Gutenberg website: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/ Project Gutenberg Newsletter website: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/newsletter Radio Gutenberg: http://www.radio-gutenberg.com Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net Newsletter and mailing list subscriptions: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/subs.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ============= [ SUBMIT A NEW EBOOK FOR COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE ]============== If you have a book you would like to confirm is in the public domain in the US, and therefore suitable for Project Gutenberg, please do the following: 1. Check whether we have the eBook already. Look in http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/GUTINDEX.ALL which is updated weekly. (The searchable catalog at http://www.gutenberg.net lags behind by several months) 2. Check the "in progress" list to see whether someone is already working on the eBook. Sometimes, books are listed as in progress for years - if so, email David Price (his address is on the list) to ask for contact information for the person working on the book. The "in progress" list: http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html 3. If the book seems to be a good candidate (pre-1923 publication date, or 1923-1988 published in the US without a copyright notice), submit scans of the title page and verso page (even if the verso is blank) to: http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html You'll hear back within a few days. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) News and Comment Donations update from Greg Newby Project Gutenberg runs on volunteer power. To support our many thousands of active volunteers, we rely on donations from individuals and organizations. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was formed in 2001, in order to be the organizational home to the Project Gutenberg effort. Dr. Greg Newby is the CEO, with Dr. Doug Bowman and Dr. Harry Hilton as Directors. All are volunteers. Paid employees of PGLAF are Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, Ben Stone (Michael's administrative assistant), and T. and Anne Wingate (CTO and office managers). Only Michael is full-time, the others are part-time. In addition to salaries and associated taxes and expenses, other expenses to PGLAF include some recent scanner purchases (we own two Fujitsu page scanners, and a large-format flatbed), supplies for our CD/DVD giveaway, and some travel. For example, PGLAF paid for Greg Newby and DP founder Charles Franks to present their paper, "Distributed Proofreading," at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Houston in May. One of the biggest single ongoing expenses is registering as a charity in all 50 states. This keeps Anne Wingate busy, and costs about $5000/year in registration fees. We also pay our CPA several thousand per year to prepare our audit and maintain compliance with federal and state laws. PGLAF has 501(c)(3) status from the US IRS, which designates it a charitable not-for-profit. This means that donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law, and we are able to apply for funding restricted to not-for-profits. For continued 501(c)(3) status, PGLAF undergoes a yearly audit (the 2002-03 audit is being prepared now), and needs to maintain a proper balance of small donations to large. Donations to PGLAF arrive via PayPal, check, credit card, and occasional larger gifts or grants. PayPal donations are typically $10-$100. We get 10-20 per month. Donations by check range from quite small (just a few dollars) to several hundred dollars, again with about 10-20 per month arriving. In some cases, people have used their workplace to make donations, including regular donations, via the United Way or other institutions. We also get a direct bank deposit from NetworkForGood, reflecting $100-200/month in credit card donations (until this month, we did not get date about how many donations this reflected -- it's 5-10, so far). Added together, a typical month brings in anywhere from $800-$3000 in donations of under $500, from 20-50 individuals. This includes royalty payments for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark (per our "small print" in each eBook). Complete details on donation methods are in our Donation HOWTO. Visit http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg PGLAF also receives larger donations. So far in 2003, we received two donations of $10,000 (one from an individual, the other from a company), and a grant of $25,000 from a foundation. Most donations come with no strings attached (there are limitations from the IRS on how the money may be spent, or bargained for), but the foundation grant included a stipulation that about $2500 would be spent on an evaluation study. PGLAF is always interested in working with potential donors, or in approaching sources such as charitable foundations or government agencies for funding. Email Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org or one of our mailing lists to talk about possibilities. In addition, we are open to suggestions on good things to spend our money on. Generally, we want to get the most possible value from our budget, and are primarily interested in investing in our volunteers to enhance eBook production. Greg Newby ------------------- Call to arms - The Gutenberg Bible Guess what? My wife thinks PG has the Gutenberg Bible online. We don't. This _LARGE_ project will require an army of volunteers (including me) who are willing to surf to http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/default.asp and save the images onto their hard-drives manually, then another army to convert the color files to B&W so that another army (of one) can train Abbyy Finereader to recognize it so that we don't have to type it in (although we _WILL_ if we have to). Then it will hit DP and go through proofing. An immense project but one well worth doing. They said we couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't, but we will. Won't we? Contact garvint@yahoo.com to enlist. There are no 4Fs in _this_ army. Ted Garvin ------------------- Other news items this week Project Gutenberg is interested digitized music in all forms. We have a large-format scanner suitable for sheet music, and have released musical scores in Finale and MusicXML formats. We would welcome MIDI, Lilypond, and other formats, as well. Visit: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/music for our current sheet music offerings and files available for processing. Contemporary scores (with copyright permission) and older musical plays would also be of interest. As for all Project Gutenberg items, the first step is to get copyright clearance (http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html). ----------------------------- New York is Book Country is being held this week. A street market is happening on Sunday 21st Sept in 5th Avenue between 11am - 5pm. Juliet sutherland is planning on attending to purchase lots and lots of juicy materials to send PG's way. She would like to hear from you if you are able to attend, particularly if you own a laptop you can take with you to check David Price's list. Please mail us here at news@pglaf.org if you are interested, and we will pass your details on. ----------------------------- Library for sale Charles Norton, a Cincinnati resident, Mark Twain scholar and former librarian is moving into a retirement community. His 11,000 volume personal library (including 800 books by or about Mark Twain) is up for sale. A URL is given below for more information, there is no information in the article as to how many of these might be pre-1923. http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/09/13/loc_twainscholar13.html Many thanks to Ken Reeder for this item ---------------------------- Music - Help with Finale and Sibelius The current music files in PG are in Finale format, and Joel Erikson is hoping to convert them into Sibelius. There's only one problem. He could really use help from someone who has a copy of Finale to do this. If you think you can help Joel in any way, please mail him at joel at oneporpoise.com, or mail us here at the newsletter and we will pass your message along. ------------------- Distributed Proofreaders Update So much to write about so little time and space. This is a very (active) week at DP. After a little post-DP2K nap in early September, we are back up to cruising speed. Actually we're already making the jump to light-speed. The past two days were among the top ten in page productivity for all of 2003. The next few days are likely to join that club, maybe even the Top 5. You'll need to tune in to find out. Of course there are other components of the success story of this month than the focus on daily page counts can ever indicate. A cross section of a day's labor at DP reveals that there is much more going on here than proofreading. What we try to do each week with this column is explore the various departments of production that work together in producing finished texts for Project Gutenberg. There are some very interesting developments going on in the many workshops of DP spread out across this planet of ours. As these are silent and often solitary labors, they don't tend to register in the day to day flurry of site activity. In a structural sense, DP works quite a bit like a film studio. The Proofing Rounds are comparable to the actual movie shoot, and like this stage in a film's life, this is the activity which generates all the buzz. Surrounding the active center are two processes which are the most labor intensive because they are in the hands of just a few individuals sometimes only one person. Charles Franks and his team of coders are developing methods for distributing some of the larger processes, but up till now and for the immediate future, these tasks are overseen individually. The initial stage is the Preparation Process. This can be called, for convenience, 'Pre Production,' as it's objective is to prepare a text for the on-site work in the Proofing Rounds. Next week we will explore the preparation stage in detail. The third stage is officially called 'Post Processing,' as it takes the many pages of a proofed text and weaves them all back together into a single text file. The final segment of this process is 'Verification,' where all preceding work is checked on all points of significance, before final submission to Project Gutenberg. Today we will take little bit of a closer look into DP Post Production. When a project finishes the Second Round it's a little messier than you might imagine. The shadow side of the distributed advantage is the vast variety of proofing styles, manners and comprehension of the Guidelines. It is the Post Processor's (undeclared) job to be Governor of all the proofers who worked on a particular text. This can be tough work sometimes, depending on the complexity of the project. One of the significant developments to arise within DP is the construction of a set of program tools that have expedited the daunting labor of both Pre and Post production. Room does not allow me to do justice to the work which has gone into producing these tools. We will learn more about them when we look into Pre Production. In a future column I will focus exclusively on these programs, after some interviews with their creators. For the first year and a half or so at DP, it was often the Project Manager who carried a text through Post. As this was the same person who had done all the preparation tasks, this was a labor intensive job. The increase in the number of projects moving through the Rounds demanded both innovation and some form of distribution for the post stages, and with time and hard work such a system evolved. Along with the program tools a Forum was created dedicated solely to Post Processing, where questions could be answered growing over time into a collected body of lore which new processors continue to draw upon for guidance. In late 2002 the Post Processing Queue was created to organize the projects after completing Round 2, this encouraged a wider audience to participate. In 2003 certain projects were partitioned into small segments that provided a means for interested proofers to expand their participation. Also this year the Verification Queue was initiated and has proven a great assist in maintaining a steady flow of completed texts. One of the side benefits of the Verification Q' is that it provided a key component in a monitor system that allows Project Managers and System Administrators to easily keep track of the entire work flow of projects at DP. In previous columns we have explored the 'Project Release Queue,' those texts in line for release into the first proofing round. The other Q's are equally as exciting to watch, and reveal those projects which are on the doorstep of the PG library. Another little known fact about the Verification stage is that it serves a secondary purpose to supporting the Post Processor's craft. During Verification, experienced Post Processors are guided and trained by existing Verifiers until eventually they are skilled enough to submit projects directly to PG. There is much more to the Post Production process. The aim here is to open the door and peek in over the shoulders of the processors and to broaden our sense of another of those 'quiet' labors which fall under the heading of Distributed Proofreaders. It's an ongoing journey which this column will continue to tag along on and hopefully explore a little further each week. Stick around! ...things are just getting started. I cannot close this week without a mention of something that has just unfolded today. Bill Keir, one of DP's System Administrators has added a new wing to the forums. We now have an independent branch set aside specifically for Project Discussions. This expands upon the existing Project forum by creating two entirely new forums. One is an archive for the discussion threads of projects that have passed through DP and now live within the stacks of PG. This provides a reference resource that can help future projects which face similar challenges to elder DP texts. It is also a fun playground for those who like to explore history or just rekindle fond memories of of their participation in a particular project. The second new project forum is dedicated to large scale or special need projects. If you are interested in watching DP strut down the avenue in one of its best suits, this is a place to park your browser. As mentioned a couple of weeks back, one of the most impressive successes of this project is that by distributing the labor of digitization the 'realm of possibility' has expanded in many directions. Large scale projects that were simply too overwhelming for individual developers are now either possible or at least worth serious consideration. To understand what actually constitutes a special project, visit the forum. Bill has appropriately titled it 'UberProjects,' and he has provided clear descriptions of how the forum works and what qualifies as 'Uber.' Well that's about it for this week, except a little bit of good news for the 'Night Owls' in the audience, you now have a place to go when sleep is not a desired option. It seems that somebody had a idea that it might be fun to get together in the final 2-3 hours of each day and see whether DP had met its Daily Page Goal yet. If not, then these Distributed Insomniacs have something fun and productive to do on-line for a little while. It seems to have taken root, so if that sounds like something to your taste, visit the General forum and look for the 'Midnight Crew.' Mind you, that's a relative concept in this Global age ... so if it's 12AM in Bombay, you can't sleep, join up and set the pace for the whole day to follow. I want to express my gratitude to Tonya for working with me on this issue's column. Next week, we will take that closer look into the Pre Production steps, and begin our conversations with the tool developers of DP. We'll also get a sneak peek at the hot features that are appearing in the new site upgrade, coming soon to a monitor near you! All the best to each of you! And to our friends in or near the path of Isabel, be careful out there! Stay safe and dry! Thierry Alberto ------------------- Radio Gutenberg Update http://www.radio-gutenberg.com This week RG is running AEsop's Fables on channel 1 and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis on channel 2. If you are interested in which etexts and authors have been turned into audio ebooks, a list can now be found on the Radio Gutenberg website. If you are interested in creating a slide-show with a soundtrack from your favourite book, or piece of literature please mail us here at news@pglaf.org and we will pass your message on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Improved Service In a bid to make the newsletter more helpful to readers who may be using screen reading software. We are able to offer the booklisting in a different format to make your life a little easier. An example of the changed listing is given below. If you would like either a daily or weekly version of this list please email news@pglaf.org, and state which version you require. {Note to the unwary: this is an example.} 34 NEW ETEXTS FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG US A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman Mar 2005[esperxxx.xxx]7787 The Female Gamester, by Gorges Edmond Howard Apr 2005[fmgstxxx.xxx]7840 [Subtitle: A Tragedy] A Primary Reader, by E. Louise Smythe Apr 2005[preadxxx.xxx]7841 [Also posted: illustrated HTML, zipped only - pread10h.zip] The Rise of Iskander, by Benjamin Disraeli Apr 2005[?riskxxx.xxx]7842 [7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7risk10.txt and 7risk10.zip] [8-bit version with accented characters in 8risk10.txt and 8risk10.zip] [rtf version with accented characters in 8risk10r.rtf and 8risk10r.zip] [rtf version has numbered paragraphs; txt version has no paragraph numbers] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- QUICK WAYS TO MAKE A DONATION TO PROJECT GUTENBERG A. 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For more information, including several other ways to donate, go to http://www.gutenberg.net or email gbnewby@ils.unc.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features Nosferatu There are surprisingly many story lines connected to this single black-and-white piece of silent film, where in bright midnight light the bat-like vampire is coming to the unsuspicious human habitat on a ship with the dead captain banded to the wheel. First is the story of the movie itself : a bastard child of gifted German director Friederich Wilhelm Murnau conceived illegally from the well-known novel 'Dracula' of late Dubliner Bram (Abraham) Stoker (1847-1912) (http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_bram_stoker.html). The beautiful but jealous widow Florence Stoker was so furious about this adultery, that she had almost immediately started the copyright law-suit against movie and its creator. The naïve and feeble attempts of camouflaging the true source of movie plot, like changing the names of people and places, didn't help much and the verdict of the court was tough - to stop the film distribution and to burn (like a real witchcraft possession!) all existing copies of it. Sounds bad, huh? However there are always people that do not obey the law. Depending on its profitability for us, we call this fortunately or unfortunately quality of human behavior. In this case it is commonly agreed to use the word 'fortunately', at least by the horror movie lovers and cinema historians. Several pirate copies survived the calamity, so PG now is able now to bin it for amusement and scarring of future generations. The edifying thing is that the trial actually gave the final 'kick' to the whole blood-sucking theme in general and to the Stoker's 'Dracula' in particular, the history of vampire horror entertainments was started and the widow Stoker became rich from the copyright percentage (pay attention, oh PG people, to the Power of Publicity!). Second there is the story in the movie. When the fable plot is more or less preserved to be same as in original novel, the essence and characters are quite different. The interpretations of the changes are abundant and various. Most of them, naturally, have strictly freudistic character, because it seems that unlike the novel, where the brave humans are fighting the 'bad guys'- vampires, the movie is more like an obsessive love story. The vampire is not the cold-blooded and even somewhere charming aristocrat, looking on humans as on a menu in a restaurant, but the unhappy hideous creature tortured by desire. Many say that the maniacal Count was the reflection of Murnau's illicit love to the killed boy-friend Hans. The Jim Shepard's fictional biography of the Murnau called also 'Nosferatu' is strongly supporting this version. Thirdly, it is the story about the making of this movie. 'The historical landmark', 'the blueprint', 'great classics of film' are the most widely used epithets regarding this Expressionist classic on the 8-mm film. The negative and superimposed images and the oddly shot scene angles of Murnau are, as they say, the very grammar of art-film making. Another innovation was the usage of natural stages, blurred and strangely shaped by special effects. Ellen sitting in the dunes covered with iron crucifixes or strange angles of the castle are the classical examples of the strange emotions brilliantly transformed to the visual images. As Murau said by himself "I like the reality of things, but not without the fantasy - they must dovetail. Is that not so with life, with human reactions and emotions? We have our thoughts and also our deeds." The last story is about the director. Friederich Wilhelm Murnau was born as Friederich Wilhelm Plumpe in the small German town of Bielefeld, on Dec. 28, 1889. After studying Philology and later Art History at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg respectively, he studied in Max Reinhart's drama school by direct invitation of Max Reinhart himself. Then came the war and F.W. was mobilized to German air force. Young actor's serving in the army during WW1 is quite remarkably reminisant of the 'Catch 22' lines - After seven (!) crashes of his airplane, he succeeded finally to get lost in the fog and land in the neutral Switzerland, where he happily remained interned till the end of hostilities. There he performed in theater and in exchange for the safety made a lot of propaganda films for the German embassy. Back in Berlin after the war, he formed a production company (Murnau Veidt Filmgesellschaft) and made several movies in noir-Gothic fashion like 'Der Knabe in Blau/The Boy in Blue'(1919), and 'Satanas' (also 1919). Then he makes his first (and more successful) attempt to violate the copyright law by making movie based on Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", called "Der Januskoph/The Janus Head" (1920). All those movies are lost in the time-space so the first remaining one is "Der Gang in Die Nacht/The Gang in the Night" (1920). The fame started to burn its incense to Murnau-director only in 1922 after Nosferatu. Then "Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh" in 1924 established his international reputation and he was invited to Hollywood*. He was customarily unhappy overseas, complaining about too much pressure and control from the money-power people, since his first project, "Sunrise" (1927), was extremely artistic and extremely non-profitable. So Murnau's wings were significantly cut by initially generous William Fox, by induced happy endings and other tricks that supposed to make the new movies more life- and money-supporting. Naturally, F.W. broke his contract and made few documentaries with the newly-established Colorart company. The new company was artistically supportive but also naturally not profitable. So after the bankruptcy of Colorart, he sponsored the new movie 'Tabu' from his own pocket. Then in March of 1931 F.W.Murau was killed in a car accident before the film premiered. The final shots will be of the world today - the search for Nosferatu in Google gives 275.000 links. Not all of them are about the movie, there are plenty of horror games and infernal stories, when the name itself is already a common noun, representing vampire clans and forces of dark. The remake of Nosferatu in 1979 together with the new rock-based score are mostly curiosities and almost forgotten already. The freshly made 'Interview with a vampire' where the respectable actor Max Schreck was portrayed as a real vampire, is not so bad according to reviews, however will probably survive in history mostly by the connection with it's famous prototype - the black and white piece of silent film, where in bright midnight light the bat-like vampire is coming to the unsuspicious human habitat on ship with the dead captain banded to the wheel That's all, folks. Nosferatu final titles: Director: F.W.Murnau Screenplay: Henrik Galeen Year Released: 1922 Starring cast (in alphabetical order): - Gustav Botz .... Dr. Sievers, Town Doctor - Karl Etlinger .... Sailor - John Gottowt .... Professor Bulwer - Alexander Granach .... Knock - Wolfgang Heinz .... First mate - Guido Herzfeld .... Innkeeper - Ruth Landshoff .... Lucy Westrenka - Max Nemetz .... Captain - G.H. Schell .... Westrenka - Max Schreck .... Graf Orlok/Nosferatu - Greta Schr?der .... Ellen Hutter - Albert Venohr .... Sailor - Heinrich Witte .... Sailor - Hardy von Francois .... Doctor in Hospital - Gustav von Wangenheim .... Hutter Original score: Hans Erdmann (1887-1942) A recording of this spine-chilling masterpiece is available on CD on the RCA Victor Red Seal label, catalogue number 09026 68143 2. And few useful internet sites: http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/bio/celeb/1676735, for nicely written biography http://www.phillyburbs.com/halloween2001/dracula/nosferatwo.shtml, for a funny freudistic plot interpretation http://www.sloppyfilms.com/murnau/nosferat.html, for real passionate movie review And for those who like the author of these notes do not like the noir and vampires, see http://www.whitehouseanimationinc.com/kunstbar.htm for nice illustration of influence of the art on our lives Gali Sirkis * Gali's original version of these notes stated 'Hollowood'. Please add your own irony - Ed ------------------- About Radio Gutenberg. My first contact with the Gutenberg project came in or about 1984. I was stunned as the value and worth of the collection were indisputable, yet it existed in a world without price tags. In the early 1990s, my father-in-law began to lose his vision to macular degeneration. By 2000 he was no longer able to watch television or read the newspaper. Radio is now his only link to the world, outside of family. IBM came into the linux world at that point in my life, and made a copy of ViaVoice running the Eloquence engine available for download. It was Emacspeak compatible. Jon Grimm and I made a bootable CD-ROM and packaged it with about a hundred of the most famous and popular texts in the collection. At about the same time, Jon and I began to experiment with live broadcasting over the internet using Icecast. We also engaged in several excursions introducing the Gutenberg Collection and these technologies into local public school systems. A while later, the financial underpinnings of the Gutenberg Project showed us their fraying edges, and the idea of Radio Gutenberg made itself apparent to me: An interlinked network of local vendors creating the necessary materials for disabled access to web-based federal resources, using our "discovered" technology, could generate funding on a more stable footing than the existing Gutenberg mechanisms, and also make the collection accessable to that same visually impaired, illiterate and English as a second language audience. Why this, and not something else? Self determination. Rather than choosing to follow a formula that would take us where we were told we should go, we found our own in a model that begins with who and where we are. The first and most critical problem that had to be solved in creating audio books that would be useful was to create a means of production that would create sufficient volumes of materials to make an impact, and still preserve the meaning of the works to be presented in audio. A book is in many ways analogous to a musical score in that the words represent pitch sequences, and the punctuation represents phrasing - especially rests ( the silences). The reading of a book, like the playing of music, depends first and foremost on meter. So that is how we built the book editing software, to make the meter acceptable first, and then to address other problems in the performance. Once an acceptable meter had been achieved, the audio books suffered from problems similar to those experienced by a human reader suffering from stroke damage. So we had a speech pathologist submit our editor software to a battery of standardized tests. Today our efforts are focused on accent reduction, correct pronunciation of French, Spanish and Native American place names, resolution of accents in homographs and speed. Our ultimate goal is to create a machine that can audio enable the Library of Congress in one year, unattended. We have dubbed that machine "Deep Thought". This quarter we are working on a new process that will allow users to create a desired book on demand, and follow the progress through a web-based "dashboard". This process will allow us to keep the hundred or so most popular requested audio books available for immediate download as a zip file, a set of .mp3 files or a CD image, with any other work in the collection available through "on-demand" creation. Over the long term, we have five major goals : 1 - More human reading style for all Gutenberg audio books. Current activities include place name databases, homograph dictionaries and phrase level automatic diagramming for inflection. With these features in place, the speech synthesizer and our automatic editor may achieve parity with locally available volunteer readers, and superiority in many cases. 2 - Establishment of a broadcast network on the internet. If we had 50 icecast broadcast servers in operation today, each hosting four monophonic broadcast channels, for a total of 200 channels, that would provide a reach similar in kind to a PBS, and provide a venue for fund raising. 3 - Creation of new works for the collection. When the funding mechanisms have achieved a state of equilibrium, we hope to fund festivals, camps and workshops that bring together young unknown talent for the purpose of creating new teleplays, musical compositions and stories for distribution by Gutenberg. Bringing musicians and writers together on a campus with facilities to produce video will allow budding composers to try their hand at writing sound tracks, something unavailable anywhere today. 4 - Procurement of copyrighted works for the collection. Our most basic activity in this vein is in securing copyright permissions for pre-existing works. Our efforts are focused on the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia, the SciFi channel's collection of classic science fiction (one author at a time), Fordham University's Internet History collections and ESA/NASA materials. Long term we hope to garner a number of works from PhD candidates at accessable universities, especially in chemistry, medicine and physics. Our primary sources for these materials today include the Michoud Shuttle External Tank Assembly Facility, NASA's Stennis Space Flight Center, University of Maryland and University of New Orleans. Still very preliminary and speculative, we are also attempting to procure musical performances by the Louisiana Symphony Orchestra and a group of graduate students at the University of Akron. 5 - Creation of Video works for the collection. The Solar System series Jon and I have been working on for the past year or so began as a text only draft of the "Encyclopedia of the Solar System" ISBN 0-12-226805-9 major planetary chapters at opensourceschools.org. Since then, we have begun to separate the materials into volumes that address the role of the gravitational influence and state changes in the character of the Solar System, and feature new, original 3D videos that demonstrate the main features of the Solar System as we understand them today. The first volume of this series is due to be released on December 10th as a DVD in the Gutenberg collection. We are also engaged in preliminary assessments of DVD based text books on algebra and geometry. These textbooks will be unique in that they use visualizations to demonstrate how a field project's data are typically collected, indexed and inferentially expanded into a summation using the tools of algebra and geometry. We hope that this approach will result in the reader acquiring the "right" sort of curiosity in the world, when procedural skills are acquired because insight and intuition demand them. In this way the "ethos" of a theorem or algebraic translation procedure is revealed in the context of a real world problem. As a basis, we are selecting materials from water diversion projects here in Louisiana that intend to reclaim lost marshlands, and also environmental impact statements by both the EPA and Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries / Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. Long term, we hope these works establish the necessary preconditions for Gutenberg to become the publisher of choice for new studies of the ecology of North America's gulf coast. This probably sounds like a lot for two people to pull off. It really isn't in terms of the man-hours required. And other non-profits could provide what's needed without spending a dime (the physical facilities are paid for and under-utilized). Putting it all down on paper has been a tad disheartening, but that too is an illusion. All it takes to make this reality is for the right people to say "OK". I hope that starts with you. Thank you, patient reader for making it this far. Your comments are most welcome, especially if you decide to embark on your own new projects in a similar vein. Mike Eschman, Founder of Radio Gutenberg. ------------------- Quiz The answers to last weeks' quiz are below. Mary Wilson almost wins the newsletter Smartypants award as she was the only person to submit an entry, but she had switched two answers. Instead, she wins our eternal gratitude, and shame on the rest of you. So, the Smartypants award stays in the cupboard for a rollover next time. Thanks again to Tonya. ANSWERS: The theme of this one is children's books: 1. Anne of Green Gables etext92/anne11.txt c. Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place. 2. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz etext93/wizoz10.txt f. Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. 3. The Secret Garden etext94/gardn11.txt d. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. 4. A Little Princess etext94/lprss11.txt a. Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd- looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. 5. Five Children and It etext97/fivit10.txt g. The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, 'Aren't we nearly there?' 6. The Princess and the Goblin etext96/prgob10.txt h. There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys. 7. The Jungle Book etext95/jnglb10.txt b. It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. 8. Black Beauty etext95/bbeau10.txt i. The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. 9. The Wind in the Willows etext95/wwill10.txt e. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring- cleaning his little home. {Hey, I got that one - Ed} ------------------- Notes from Posted Inspired by this weeks' suggestions about where it is possible to source etexts from, Gali takes a look around the internet to find out, well... just what is out there? After shallow dive in the slightly troubled waters of web Orbis Tertius, I've fished out several sources for e-texts with one thing in common - they do not have a clue about PG. No link or ever mentioning. They do know each other, though. OK, indeed, I am a stranger in PG debris, with infinitely small understanding of the life behind the emails, so let's go to business: Starting from the most familiar for myself: http://lib.ru - library of Maxim Moshkov contains huge amount various books in Russian. While it might be a problem with Russian copyright, the Russian classical literature is widely available there - Tolstoj, Pushkin and Gogol for sure will not sue PG for the unauthorized e-copies of their work. The translations are also readily available upon request. Cooperation of PG with this source of e-text has one more important point - The potential proofreading power of Russian readers is enormous - most of them are literate, enjoy the process and have an access to the internet. From lib.ru my quest for books about Till Ulenshpiegel led me to the nice little collection of French classical literature: http://abu.cnam.fr/BIB/index.html Their copyright required the mentioning of the e-source which definitely will not harm anybody. Almost none of the books from this site are in GUTVOL index file in their mother-French version. The bunch of e-text collections below are cross-referenced and one of them, the Virginia one claims to the one of the largest e-text collections with 6000000 downloads in a year, as far as I remember. BTW in connection to Hawthorne biography from previous newsletter issue - they possess the full documentary of Salem witchcraft trials http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/texts/transcripts.html, which would be nice to have together with the Hawthorne collection. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/centers.html http://etext.lib.virginia.edu http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/indiv/ets/ http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Default.htm Then few very rich in information sites with all kind of ancient texts in original Greek and Latin - the real challenge for DP, as well as in translations http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ - which itself has plenty of texts such as code of Hammurabi http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html in English or to the Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War in Greek with embedded forms http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/thucy1.doc . It also provides good live links to plenty of historical documents, such as early Egyptian literature, e.g. http://www.egyptology.com/extreme/mehy/. You can also have a look on : http://www.iuscivile.com/materials/sources.shtml for Rome originated documents and papyruses. Or on http://www.sikhs.org/transl.htm you can find beautifully composed Morning Prayer by Guru Nanak. Uf, I have to accent slowly from the water: my oxygen counter shows almost 0 already ? So hope it will help or give a material for thoughts, or at least add few more texts for PG collection ? it would be a shame to waste this amount of information, waiting for the future generations to dig it out from the deep waters of the ancient source of human communication - the mysterious and infernal Internet. Gali Sirkis ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mailing list information For more information about the Project Gutenberg's mailing lists please visit the following webpage: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/subs.html Trouble? If you are having trouble subscribing, unsubscribing or with anything else related to the mailing lists, please email "owner-gutnberg@listserv.unc.edu" to contact the lists' (human) administrator. If you would just like a little more information about Lyris features, you can find their help information at http://www.lyris.com/help ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits Thanks this time go to Brett and George for the numbers and booklists. Thierry, Gali, Steve Herber, Michael and Tonya, Greg, Michael, and Larry Wall. Entertainment for the workers provided by absolutely no-one as my internet connection wasn't working so I couldn't get 6music (Dear Santa, for Xmas please can I have a digital radio?). Also, Subject: Smthng intrstng Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and the lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. Takhns to Gali!
pgweekly_2003_09_17_part_2.txt
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