Return-Path: <nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id gAC4BdX17199; Mon, 11 Nov 2002 23:11:39 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 23:11:39 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0211112307390.9070-100000@shagrat.silicongoblin.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Steve Linberg" <steve@silicongoblin.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-TECHNOLOGY:2659] Distributed Proofreading - help needed X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O Content-Length: 3561 Lines: 77 (Note: I sent this to the list last week, but it seems to have gotten eaten by the list processor. Trying again.) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Fellow NIFL-Tech'ers, Want to help save the world by enriching the public domain? You may have heard of Project Gutenberg - one of the heroic jewels of the internet. It's been around for a long time, and its goal is to enrich the public domain by scanning and transcribing books and texts that have become public domain and making them available free, for download. I used them a lot when I was teaching. It's an entirely volunteer effort to help preseve the public domain and make public-domain books accessible to anyone who wants them. I believe copyright law currently protects written work for 70 years, which means anything copyrighted in 1932 or earlier is in the public domain. There are efforts from the publishing industry to change this to "life plus 70", meaning 70 years from the death of the author, not from the date of publication. If this succeeds, we'll see another huge rollback in the public domain, where only books whose AUTHORS died in 1932 or earlier would be eligible, but I digress. It's a huge amount of work to transcribe a book. I've done it. You either type it out by hand, or you scan the book's pages with a scanner and then run them through an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition) that tries to turn the IMAGE of the text into actual text, analyzing the shape of the letters. Depending on the quality of the original, this is usually faster than typing, but still requires heavy proofing. It's very time-consuming and a lot of beginning efforts die on the vine because it's so hard. There's a new project up online that you can join to help the effort to get scanned books proofed. They ask "a page a day" of volunteers. I just joined and did my first page, it took about ten minutes. If you feel, as I do, that a rich public domain is an indispensible cornerstone of any literacy effort, particularly in an era of ever-tightening budgets and programs run on a shoestring, please consider kicking in a few minutes of your time to help. It seems like a really worthy cause, and they've made it VERY easy to contribute. The site is at this address: http://texts01.archive.org/dp This is how it works: you go there and create an account. (You can also read about the project and so forth). With your account you log in immediately, and then you are presented with a list of books in need of proofing. You can pick the one you want to work on (I chose one about copyright authors, a statistical work that's dry but important for the project), but there's also poetry, literature (someone's doing The Iliad, among others), and more. You click "project info and start proofing", read the project manager's notes for that book, and then you're given a scanned page to look at and a text box with the scanned text from the page. You go through and correct the errors as best you can, and then you submit it. That's it! You can also review the pages you've done and go over them again if you want. It also keeps your statistics and you can see how the overall project is doing. Very cool. Personally I really enjoyed the simplicity of being able to do one discrete, tangible bit of good so easily in a time so generally rife with bad news. Cheers, Steve -- Steve Linberg, Chief Goblin Silicon Goblin Technologies http://silicongoblin.com Be kind. Remember, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
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