for more.
XML (Format for . . . well, just about anything :-)
eXtensible Markup Language looks a bit like HTML, but whereas tags
such as
have a standard meaning in HTML, XML allows anyone to
define their own set of tags and meanings using a Document Type
Definition (DTD) file. Add a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file to
that, and you have the ability to display the text according to
predefined rules. In principle, this seems to make it ideal for the
storage and processing of etexts, since a suitable DTD and CSS,
together with the right programs, should make it possible to produce
any format of eBook automatically from an XML original. Some PG
volunteers have looked at, and are looking at, ways to convert the
entire archive using a satisfactory DTD; however, meantime we aren't
actually producing much XML, since most volunteers aren't working with
it, and nobody wants to start producing many XML texts until we have
agreed on a DTD.
is the definitive source
for more information about XML.
Volunteers' Voices
In this section, we asked volunteers to talk about their practical
experiences with Project Gutenberg, how they joined, why they give
up their hours to work for Free Etexts, how they get down to the
nitty-gritty of producing texts.
Some people chose an interview format for their responses, with
pre-set questions; others just wrote.
Amy Zelmer
I stumbled across Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago--can't
remember just what I was looking for on the web but the idea of PG
intrigued me. I was also looking for something to get me reading
materials which I wouldn't ordinarily read, so didn't particularly
want to find a book in which I was interested--and the whole process
of finding a book, finding out if it was already "in progress" and
then checking out copyright clearance seemed just a little daunting
from what I was able to gather from the info on the web.
Furthermore, I live in a small regional city in Australia, so the
possibilities of finding something in either the local library or in a
second-hand bookshop was next to nil.
Fortunately I also found Sue Asscher's name and figured that I'd ask a
fellow Aussie how to get started. Sue seems to have an inexhaustible
stock of books waiting to be entered -- and got me started on Thomas
Huxley's "Essays and Lectures". I've now done five other books and am
currently working on Darwin's "The Power of Movement in Plants"--quite
a variety, but it's at least met my goal of reading something
different.
Fortunately Sue was also patient about answering my beginner's
questions about formatting dilemmas and has been able to co-ordinate
other aspects of the process, like getting scans of diagrams and final
proof-reading. That means all I have to do is put in the text.
I'm a reasonably good typist -- and the practice with PG is certainly
improving both my speed and accuracy! (That's meant as a word of
encouragement to others.) I generally type for about 20 minutes at a
time, then take a break; both my concentration and desire to prevent
RSI (repetitive strain injury or occupational overuse syndrome) mean
that it's better to do shorter sessions more frequently than to carry
on for too long a time. I generally use Microsoft Word 2001 for
Macintosh for the first entry and spell check, then save the material
in "text only" and do a final read through, removing page numbers and
correcting errors which the spell-checker missed as I go.
I've also done some data input for another ebook collection. However,
they separate the text and send out small batches of pages to many
volunteers. I find that rather frustrating since it's impossible to
see how your piece fits until the whole thing is finally posted.
I've done some scanning, OCR and proof-reading of material, but
generally find the close proof-reading which is required very
frustrating. To each his own method.
Ben Crowder
I've been a book lover ever since the day I learned to read.
Several years ago I discovered Project Gutenberg while surfing the
net and was delighted to find so many good books freely available.
I downloaded all the etexts I was interested in and read quite a few
of them. After a few years, I decided to get more involved, so I
started proofing with Distributed Proofreaders. I liked that a lot
-- I was a newspaper editor in high school for two years -- but I
felt an itch to try to produce etexts on my own. I didn't have a
scanner, however, so the only solution I could see at the time was
to find a book and start typing it in by hand. I'm a relatively
fast typist and I figured it wouldn't take that long.
So, I went to my university library, found a pre-1923 edition of
G.K. Chesterton's _The Ball and the Cross_ (Chesterton is one of my
favorite writers), and began typing. It took much longer than I
expected -- certainly over 30 hours, perhaps even close to 50. When
I finished, I came across a page on the PG site that mentioned there
should be two spaces between sentences. I looked at the etext I'd
just typed in and realized in horror that I'd used single spaces the
whole way through. :) [1] I had been *sure* that PG used single spaces,
convinced that I'd read it in one of the PG docs, which had taken a
little while to get used to since I normally use two spaces. But
all the PG etexts I checked had two spaces between sentences, so I
began the monotonous task of adding an extra space between each
sentence (and being very careful not to add spaces in where they
shouldn't be). Several hours later the book was finally done. I'd
gotten copyright clearance before I started, so I soon submitted it
and within a few days I saw those lovely words in my inbox, "Posted
(#5265, Chesterton)".
[1] Ben was right both times: people have posted advocating
both one space and two. Either would have been accepted!--jt
Since then, I've been addicted to producing etexts. Languages
interest me greatly, so I found an Old Icelandic primer that someone
had scanned in, OCRed the images using DocMorph (it didn't take as
long as I thought it would, and the output was decent enough to work
with), and realized I would have a problem entering in the foreign
characters (o's with hooks underneath, etc.). Thank heavens for
Unicode. Vim (my editor of choice) has fairly good Unicode support
and it didn't take long to make a list of the Unicode codes for the
Icelandic characters.
As noted, I use Vim for all my editing. I can rewrap lines to 65
characters by typing "gq", I can use regular expressions for search
and replaces (*very* handy), I can edit in Unicode when I need to,
and I can speed things up greatly by making keyboard mappings for
repetitive tasks. (On one text I was working on, I had to add a
blank line between each paragraph. Each was numbered, but the blank
lines had somehow been taken out before I got the text, so I started
going through and adding them in by hand. The file was 30,000 lines
long, however, and I quickly realized it would take a *long* time.
I then noted which keys I was pressing to add the blank line between
each paragraph, mapped them to
, and held the key down while Vim
zipped through the rest of the file. It sped it up by a factor of
over a hundred.)
My university library is well-stocked and has lots of old books, so
I usually rely on it when I need to get TP&V's for texts I'm not
typing in myself. I still don't have a scanner, so I either find
already-existing texts on the Internet and reformat them for Project
Gutenberg (after getting permission, of course), or find page images
on the net and OCR them myself, or type the books in by hand.
Typing in by hand takes a long time and so I prefer the first two
methods.
Volunteering with Project Gutenberg has been extremely satisfying.
The people are wonderful to work with, the work is fun, and it feels
very good to know that one is making a difference in the world.
Col Choat
How I got started
People sometimes ask me how I got started in preparing etexts for
Project Gutenberg, and while they probably ARE interested in my story
often they are really more interested in finding out whether it is
something that they might want to get involved with. Jim Tinsley, a
colleague at PG, recently prepared a "questionnaire" as a way of
stimulating existing volunteers to document their PG experiences.
Answering the questionnaire seems as good a way as any to answer the
question, "how did you get started".
HOW DID YOU LEARN ABOUT PG?
I think it was probably from a newspaper or a computer magazine. I
can't really recall, now.
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CONTACT LIKE.
Initially, I visited the site to search for books I was interested in,
to see if they had been posted at PG. That was quite a straightforward
process. I downloaded a few texts and either read them at my computer
or, occasionally, printed them out to read later.
When I became interested in volunteering, I visited the site to get
some information about how to go about it. I found it a bit daunting,
really. There was a lot of information but it was difficult for me to
get it sorted out in my mind. There were copyright issues, editing
rules, and procedures for lodging etexts. There was a question and
answer page and some background and information for those wanting to
subscribe to the PG mailing lists. In the end, I just sent an e-mail to
Michael Hart, whose e-mail address was listed on the site, and said
"what can I do?" I notice that volunteers still sometimes do that.
WHAT WAS THE FIRST PG JOB YOU DID? HOW DID IT GO?
I decided to prepare an etext from a book I had in my home library,
titled "UNDER THE NORTHERN LIGHTS". It is a series of short stories
about the Canadian North by Alan Sullivan. I had a small "hand"
scanner at home, which I hadn't used much before. I didn't know any
better, so I would scan in about ten pages and save them as "tif"
files. Then I would use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
software supplied with the scanner to convert the image to text for
subsequent editing. I recently purchased an A4 scanner with
state-of-the-art OCR software and I can't believe how I persevered
with that hand scanner for so long.
I tried to apply the editing rules outlined on the PG site, though
they weren't as prescriptive as I would have liked. I wanted
certainty, as I felt that I didn't know enough to apply own editing
rules. I didn't have a good text editor, either, so I probably made
the job more difficult than it needed to be. More about the "tools of
the trade" later, though.
When I submitted the title pages of the book to PG for copyright
clearance it was rejected because the book was published in 1926. I
don't know what I was thinking about when I chose it. It must have
just LOOKED old enough. I had scanned and proofed about half of it, so
I just abandoned it and looked for something else. Interestingly,
Australians and residents in other countries with similar copyright
laws, can now read it as it is in the public domain in Australia and
is now on the Project Gutenberg of Australia site. I was able to
finish it and post it at PG, after all.
HOW DID YOU DEVELOP YOUR PG EXPERIENCE FROM THERE?
I think that one of the most valuable things I did was to join the
volunteer discussion group. I found that I didn't need to take part,
but could just take note of all the different issues raised by other
volunteers. Some days there was no activity by the group, but then a
hot topic would be raised (e.g. whether some books, such as Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler, should not be accepted by PG, even if eligible) and
there would be plenty of comments. I realised also that I could ask
for help on specific questions regarding preparation of texts and
receive prompt informative answers. Once, when I thought that I was
sending to ONE of the members of the group an e-mail with a large
attachment, I was quickly made aware that EVERYONE had received it.
Some weren't amused, but I am a quick learner--I didn't do it again.
Subscribing to the weekly newsletter is also worthwhile. There is a
link on the main page of the PG web site to allow people to subscribe
to the mailing list and discussion group. I also found a few people
who I began to e-mail privately, outside the discussion group. That
helped a lot, too. Perhaps there is merit in instigating a mentor
scheme, whereby a new volunteer can refer to another more experienced
one for help, guidance and encouragement. I would be interested in
taking part in that.
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE FIRST TEXT YOU PRODUCED.
As I mentioned earlier, my first attempt was abortive (initially, at
least). However, as I had realised that there was not much Australian
content on PG, I decided to go in that direction. Then I found that
there were many eligible Australian titles already on the internet,
mostly in HTML format. These can only be read using a web browser, so
I decided that it would be worthwhile to download them, convert them
to text files, compare them with a book of the same title which was
eligible for PG copyright approval, and then have them posted at PG. I
had learned my lesson, so from then on I always got the approval
BEFORE I started work on the conversion.
I prepared a number of etexts using this method and quickly increased
the amount of Australian content at PG. However, I still wanted to
create an etext from a book. My sister had given me, as a gift,
"Australia's Greatest Books" by Geoffrey Dutton, which reviewed
approximately one hundred books and I decided to work my way through
them. I had already converted a number from HTML, as outlined above,
so the first on the list to be scanned turned out to be the journal of
Charles Sturt who explored south-eastern Australia between 1828 and
1831. I was quite pleased with myself when the two volumes were
finally posted at PG.
WHY DO YOU SPEND YOUR HOURS CONTRIBUTING TO PG?
The simple answer is "because it is FUN". It is easy to make up
justifications, but since there is no necessity to do it, it must be
because I enjoy it. I get a sense of achievement that the work I do
will be "out there" for a long time. We haven't begun to realise where
technology will lead us. The books I prepare will be able to be read
by people anywhere on earth, and even beyond, by astronauts travelling
to Mars. "Send up THE ODYSSEY will you Scottie, I have always meant to
read it."
I have had some unexpected pleasures, too. I have "met" some
wonderfully generous and interesting people and I have read some
wonderful books that I would not have taken the trouble to read if I
weren't preparing them for PG.
DO YOU SPECIALISE IN ANY PARTICULAR KIND OF WORK, OR TEXTS?
I started out thinking that I would stick to books with an Australian
flavour. But I can't help myself. If I see something that I am
interested in, and it is already on the internet, but not at PG, I
have to do it. I have submitted etexts of James Joyce's "Ulysses", and
works by D. H. Lawrence, and Norman Douglas. I also have a long list
of books I would like to scan in myself, not all of which are about
Australia--one day.
WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT MAKING A PG ETEXT?
I think I have covered that already. I like the sense of achievement,
the fun of reading the book, and the thought that it will be available
to many people who would not otherwise have access to it, possibly in
a form which has not yet been invented.
WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT MAKING A PG ETEXT?
Sometimes the going is not easy. Occasionally I get impatient with the
length of time it is taking and sometimes I get bored with the subject
matter. I recently purchased a new scanner with excellent OCR
software, which converts the page image to text, and that has given me
a new lease of life because less proofing is required. I sometimes
remind myself that I don't have to do it, then I find that I want to
anyway.
WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR ELIGIBLE BOOKS
Local libraries have a surprising amount of eligible material. The
main difficulty is finding books with a publication date of 1922 or
earlier, for PG in the US anyway. I have found a number of "facsimile"
editions which are direct reprints of the original, and these are
acceptable. I also look around second-hand bookshops. I recently found
a battered copy of "A short history of Australia" published in about
1910, and bought it for $A1.50. For books eligible for posting at the
PG Australian site, cheap paperbacks are readily available. I am
working on one now, and have ripped all the pages out of it to make it
easier to scan. It only cost a few dollars. There are also a number of
sites on the internet which list second-hand books for sale.
DO YOU TYPE OR SCAN? WHAT SCANNER/OCR/EDITOR/WORD PROCESSOR DO YOU
PREFER?
This section might as well cover all of the "tools of the trade". I
have noticed that volunteers have many favourite tools, and from what
I can make out most will do the job. The list below covers what _I_
have settled on. I should note that I work in the Windows environment,
and tools are readily available for all the things I need to do.
Scanner
I recently purchased a Canon A4 flatbed scanner without a document
feeder for under $A200. It has a hinged lid for scanning books and
comes bundled with image enhancing software and OCR software for
converting image to text.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Software
'Omnipage Version 9' came bundled with the scanner. I find that I
don't need any of the other software which came with the
scanner--Omnipage does it all for me. I can scan, proof, spellcheck
and save the output to a text file with very little effort.
Editor
I use Editplus which is available as shareware on the internet. It
enables me to read in the file produced by the Omnipage OCR software
and reformat it to a line length suitable for PG texts (about 70
characters). It also allows one to display guide lines vertically on
the page to help with checking for "long" lines. I have loaded James
Joyce's "Ulysses" into Editplus and it handled it, so I presume that
it will handle files of any size. As with everything one wants to do
at PG, there is always someone more than willing to help with problems
encountered, just by posing questions to the volunteer discussion.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Software
Some volunteers e-mail their submissions to PG as an attachment to an
e-mail. However, it is also possible to place them at the PG site for
processing, using FTP. Microsoft Windows Explorer has an FTP facility
which can handle this and that suits me. I know that there are many
others and SmartFTP is an excellent freeware product for those who
need Windows-based FTP software.
Other Tools
I use Microsoft Word to convert HTML files to text files. Firstly, I
cut and paste the html document into word, then I convert any italics
to upper case, since italics are not supported in plain text files;
then I save the document as a text file. Then I use Editplus,
mentioned above, to reformat the line length. Sometimes it is
necessary to add an extra "carriage return" at the end of each
paragraph, to comply with the preferred style for PG texts. This can
be done from within Word or Editplus by replacing characters. New
volunteers may need to ask for information about this process.
HOW DO YOU CHECK YOUR TEXT? ANY SPECIAL TOOLS? SPELLCHECKER? DO YOU
PRINT IT OUT AND READ IT? PUT IT ON YOUR PDA AND READ IT? HAVE A VOICE
SYNTHESIS PROGRAM READ IT ALOUD TO YOUR FROM YOUR PC?
I have tried a few different methods. I don't have a notebook computer
or etext reader so I must either read it on a PC or print it out.
There is a spellchecker with Editplus, which allows one to add new
words, so I use that to begin with. I also use GUTCHECK, a program
developed by Jim Tinsley, which picks up many errors. One would need
to contact him via PG, if one wanted a copy. I travel by train to
work, so I often make a printout and read that for the final proof, or
co-opt my wife if it is something I can interest her in. I have a
checklist, which I have developed over time, that I use to ensure that
I have covered all that I need to--but then I AM one for lists.
DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS 'N' TRICKS OR SPECIAL ROUTINES YOU GO THROUGH
WHEN PREPARING A TEXT?
I think I have covered most of my methods already. I sometimes find
that "dashes" within sentences need attention. I like to show them as
"--" so I try to be consistent and not let them slip through as " - ".
I think we at PG could get together a more or less prescriptive list
of editing rules for new volunteers to follow. Once they gained
experience they could change them if they wanted to. I do like to
place an end marker ("THE END") at the end of my progressing work, so
that I don't inadvertently lose any of it and I make several rotating
backups of the file I am working on. I have "lost" computer files once
or twice over the years and don't want to get that sick feeling in my
stomach EVER again.
As I said earlier, I do have a checklist, and it could help if PG
(that includes me, as PG is "us") provided a downloadable list of
things which need to be done to get an etext posted e.g. copyright
approval, scanning, editing, proofing, placing relevant information at
the beginning of the etext, etc. All the information is there already,
it just needs bringing together into one document.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE YOU TO MAKE A TEXT?
Obviously it depends on the number of pages, efficiency of the scanner
and the number of hours one puts in. The two volumes of Sturt
mentioned above probably took me six months, but I was doing many
other things in the meantime. To scan in and edit, say, "The Prophet"
by Kahlil Gibran would only take a fraction of that time as it is
quite thin and easy to read. If one were concerned about getting an
idea of the time it would take to complete an etext, I would suggest
that he/she do a little casual proofing at the "Distributed
Proofreaders" site first, to get an idea of what is involved.
DO YOU WORK ALONE, OR DO YOU SHARE THE WORK OF EACH TEXT? DOES ANYONE
REGULARLY HELP YOU PROOF THE TEXT?
I generally work alone, however my wife will proof sometimes. She has
become interested in the book that I am working on at present and is
waiting for me to supply her with more pages. When I was getting
started, a new volunteer agreed to proof something for me (she
approached me) but then she never did any of it and didn't even e-mail
me to advise that she had changed her mind. Editing and proofing is
not for everybody and one needs to find out if one likes doing it.
However, courtesy costs nothing.
DO YOU DO SOME PG WORK REGULARLY, OR DRIFT IN AND OUT AS OPPORTUNITY
PERMITS, OR WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE IT.
All of the above at different times. I am not an avid television
watcher and would rather do some "work" (or should I say "pleasure")
for PG much of the time.
HOW MANY DIFFERENT KINDS OF WORK, OR DIFFERENT BOOKS, HAVE YOU DONE?
Because I have converted many books from work already on the internet,
I have covered quite a range, though I haven't actually scanned and
proofed too many books. Those that I have done have been Australian
historical works. But I have rounded up books on philosophy,
aboriginal legends, and several novels. Since many internet sites come
and go, I am interested in "grabbing" etexts and posting them at PG in
case the site disappears from the internet. It has become a pastime in
itself. I recently discovered "South Wind" by Norman Douglas, a book
which caused quite a sensation when it was first published because it
portrayed a bohemian lifestyle. Ironically, I used to have the book in
my home library, but dispensed with it when I needed space. Now it is
at PG and I can get it whenever I want it.
WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT THE PG PROCESS?
The democratic, helpful, friendly approach of all the people involved
is one of the things I like best. I have "met" so many wonderful
people, without having to "live" with them, if you know what I mean.
Not long after I started associating with PG, Michael Hart posted an
e-mail to the volunteer discussion group, advising of the death of a
long-time volunteer. It seemed like she had been one of the "family".
One really needs to be indifferent to praise and the prospect of
reward to start volunteering for PG. There is certainly no money in
it. However, one quickly finds that there is a community of people out
there with a common interest, and with the same outlook and the same
interest in doing a job well, without tangible reward. There is no
lack of praise though, and one soon finds that one is not indifferent
to it.
WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT THE PG PROCESS?
There isn't much that I don't like. Nothing worth mentioning, anyway.
IS THERE ANYTHING YOU'D LIKE TO SEE PG DOING DIFFERENTLY?
There are a few things, however since I don't know all the reasons for
some things being done the way they are, and because everything is
done by volunteers anyway, I wouldn't like to canvass them here. To
have produced nearly 5,000 etexts over more than 30 years is testament
to the fact that most things are being done "right".
IF ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS APPROACHED YOU TO ASK ADVICE ABOUT HOW TO GET
STARTED CONTRIBUTING TO PG, WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM?
I would spend some time with him/her and work through some of the
issues. I know that I would have benefited from that approach. I would
gradually introduce her(him) to the different issues which need to be
addressed and find out exactly what her expectations were, and try to
help her in fulfilling them.
WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT PG TO BE LIKE IN FIVE YEARS? TEN YEARS?
Much the same as it is now, I hope. After all, the goal will continue
to be to provide "fine literature digitally re-published". Though I
expect that, like other organisations, it will continue to evolve in
response to new challenges and opportunities. Ten years ago, who would
have thought that there would be 5,000 etexts posted; that there would
be volunteers operating an online proofreading site; and that there
would be a volunteer writing free software to read PG etexts? The
rapid growth of PG over the last few years will present many
challenges for the future.
Writing of etext readers, I am reminded that I recently joked to a
volunteer that I wanted him to write software for reading etexts,
whereby a hologram would appear on the inside of my eyelids so that I
could read etexts with my eyes closed. Who knows, it might be
possible. However, whatever advances in technology occur over the next
ten years, one thing is certain: the work of all the volunteers to
date will ensure that there is an amazing library of ebooks available
covering creative works by some of the greatest minds who have ever
lived. Future readers of PG ebooks will have been given a wonderful
gift by the many volunteers who have contributed to PG over the
decades.
Project Gutenberg of Australia
On the wall in a colleague's office was pinned a piece of paper on
which was written a quotation. I don't recall now what it was and the
colleague has been gone for some time and has taken the paper with
him. However under the quotation the author was acknowledged as
"Prince Machiavelli". I had a vague idea that the quote actually came
from "The Prince" by Nicolo Machiavelli, and wondered how I could
satisfy my curiosity. Then I remembered reading about Project
Gutenberg and decided to see if the book was posted on the PG site,
though I didn't really expect that it would be. Needless to say, the
etext WAS there and I was able to download it and read it in its
entirety, due to the time spent by John Bickers and Bonnie Sala (their
names appear at the beginning of the etext) in preparing it for PG.
Interestingly, there were other works by Machiavelli there, which I
hope to get back to one day.
Later, when I e-mailed PG and expressed an interest in volunteering I
was, because I said that I was Australian, referred to Sue Asscher,
the Australian Production Director for PG. Sue asked me to proofread
"A Vindication of the Rights of Women" by Mary Wollstonecraft. Also,
about this time, a journalist had contacted Sue with regard to a story
being prepared for PG. He wanted to contact some volunteers to ask why
they were interested in PG. Sue referred the journalist to me, with my
permission of course, and one of his first questions was "Is there
much Australian content on PG?" After I had checked the PG etext list
I could only reply "not much".
So I decided to start creating etexts by Australian authors, for PG.
Sue Asscher pointed out that there were many eligible Australian works
already in the public domain as etexts, so I started rounding up
etexts and matching them with books which had been published before
1923, so that they could be posted at PG. Then I started creating
etexts myself, for works I could not find already on the internet. My
sister had given me, many years ago, a book by Geoffrey Dutton titled
"Australia's Greatest Books", so I decided to start working my way
through the eligible titles from the list of about one hundred books
reviewed by Dutton. I had already found a number of them on the
internet and some were already at PG. But there were still a "few" to
be done. There still ARE a few to be done, if anyone is interested in
helping.
Then Sue Asscher again had a hand in setting the direction I would
take by asking me to proof an etext of "Animal Farm" by George Orwell,
whose work had recently entered the public domain in Australia. We
didn't know where we would post it, as it is not in the public domain
in the US, but I agreed to proof it as I had read it many years ago
and enjoyed it.
About this time, I also decided to make up a personal web site. Being
a software developer, people were always asking me about the internet
and web sites, in the mistaken belief that I knew ALL about computers.
I decided to get an idea of how web page design and web site
management worked by creating a site that listed all of the
"Australian" content at PG. When I couldn't find anywhere to put the
Orwell, which I had recently proofed, I decided to create a page on my
site for etexts in the public domain in Australia, so that Australians
and internet users in other countries with similar copyright laws,
could read and/or download them.
Michael Hart, the founder of PG, was quick to interest me in creating
an "official" PG site in Australia. After registering a business
name, getting a domain name and finding a sponsor to host the site,
Project Gutenberg of Australia was up and running.
It all happened very quickly, and as with many things which happen in
one's life, it all seems to have come about by serendipity. Even the
site's motto "A treasure-trove of literature" was stumbled upon by
chance when I looked up, in connection with another unrelated matter,
the word "treasure-trove" in a dictionary, to ascertain if the word
was hyphenated. Imagine my surprise to find treasure-trove defined as
"treasure found hidden with no evidence of ownership". That EXACTLY
defined the literature found on PG.
My own association with PG resulted from the culmination of a
life-long interest in books and literature and an equally strong
interest in computers. Every volunteer brings his/her own particular
interests and skills to PG and that, together with the democratic
approach taken by the small executive team, is what makes PG the
strong, co-operative organisation that it is. My interests and skills,
and a generous dose of serendipity, led to the creation of Project
Gutenberg of Australia.
Dagny
I discovered Project Gutenberg in 1996 and immediately wanted to help
because I love books and wanted everyone to have access to all the
wonderful books that, even today with Internet searching, are
difficult to find or very expensive when you do locate them.
I began by proofing a few works but what I really wanted to do was
share my Balzac collection with other fans. I discovered Balzac in the
1970s and recall my frustrations in trying to find more than a dozen
stories of the over one hundred Balzac wrote. It was over a decade
before my husband discovered a complete set at a used bookstore while
on vacation. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky.
With the first few stories I typed for Project Gutenberg I worried
about everything: should I correct a type-setting error, leave it,
footnote it, etc. This took a long time and involved a lot of
correspondence. Now, my idea is to make the text as readable as
possible. For me that means correcting type-setting errors I notice.
Others prefer to leave them intact. In the end, I don't believe the
readers care. I have found them generally to be very grateful to have
found some treasure they had been seeking. In some cases of an
author's more obscure works, they didn't even know the book existed,
a rare find indeed for them.
It is so satisfying to receive an e-mail from someone thanking you for
all your hard work. Most readers don't take the time to write but true
fans often do and they make it all worthwhile. I have even met people
in this way that went on to become a Project Gutenberg volunteer
themselves because they wanted to give something back to the Project
from which they had received so many pleasurable hours.
Gardner Buchanan
SOURCE MATERIAL
First of all, there is the issue of what texts I choose to do. For me,
this is fairly simple. I'm a bit of a small-time book collector
already, and have a personal theme: "Canadian English Literature" and
"Canadian English-Language History". I have no trouble whatsoever in
coming up with submissible editions of works that fit this theme
somehow. Nevertheless there are specific authors and works that I'm
not having luck with, so I'm still making the rounds of the used book
shops regularly and picking up all sorts of stuff.
Eligible volumes have typically cost me $10.00-$150.00 for a
collectable edition, or $0.50-$15.00 for a recent paperback edition or
garage-sale item. I paid $0.50 for a eligible, but not very
collectible copy of Glengary School Days by Ralph Connor at a garage
sale. As it turns out someone has beaten me to it--it has been in the
collection since 2001. Sometimes if I'm contemplating picking up a
more expensive book that I don't already have a personal interest in,
I'll go back and double-check The Online Books page to see if someone
has already submitted the book.
Another way I obtain texts is from the Early Canadiana Online archive.
They host page images of quite a large collection of old books written
in or about Canada, or written by Canadians. The page images are
reasonably well suited to OCR.
I tend to produce E-texts two different ways. One way is to submit
page images to Charles Franks who runs Distributed Proofers and let
him worry about bulk-OCR'ing. I then manage the distributed proofing,
which is a fairly low-effort business. The other way is to scan, OCR
and proof all by myself. I'm currently averaging two of my own
projects to every Distributed Proofer one.
SCANNING AND OCR
I have an very slow parallel-port scanner, a UMAX Astra 2000P. It
sucks mightily. I'd rate it a 2 out of 5, if it wasn't acting
up--creating a black bar across the page, part way along--so I have to
scan books a certain way around to avoid having the bar land in the
text. As it sits now, it's in 0.5-1 territory. It is glacially slow at
the best of times, and due to being a parallel port model, locks up my
whole computer during the scan.
Nevertheless, it is completely adequate to my needs for PG work. I've
scanned more than a dozen books on it, and it's done yeoman
service--despite its warts. Scanners like this one can be picked up
used for $30, and are worth the money.
The way I work when I'm producing a book myself, is scanning and
proofing page by page. I do the scans two-pages-up, then OCR, proof
and copy the pages to a working document, before going on to scan the
next pair of pages.
My scanner came with two OCR "packages": Omnipage something-or-other
which I was never able to install, and Recognita Standard 3.2.7. I use
Recognita, and for 300dpi scans I do, it is adequately fast and
accurate. It is a no-frills package, and DOES make many mistakes, but
it is entirely useable for my purposes. I rate it 2 of 5.
I've used the Abbyy FineReader 5.0 try & buy. This is a magnificent
OCR system. It handles huge batches and is fast and astoundingly
accurate. I rate it 5 out of 5. Unfortunately it costs about $million
to patriate a web-bought item into Canada, and while priced at a very
reasonable US$100.00, would cost me about CAN$600 after exchange-rate,
brokerage fees, shipping, more fees, taxes,
service charges and more taxes (on the fees).
I could buy Omnipage off-the-shelf here, but frankly if I can't get
Abbyy, I'll stick with Recognita.
As I scan each page, I paste it into Windows-95 Wordpad. Sometimes I
also do some proofing in Wordpad, but mainly I proof, fix quotes,
M-dashes and paragraph breaks in the OCR program before copying to
Wordpad. I like to keep the page boundaries intact, and I mark them in
my Wordpad document like this:
:
:
kjdk ldjd ll;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ljd llllkj klj dklj
page 354
kjdk ldjd lll;;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ldd lll;;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ldjd ll;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ljd llllkj klj dklj
page 355
kjdk ldd lll;;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ldjd ll;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ldd lll;;llkj dklj dklj
kjdk ljd llllkj klj dklj
:
:
At this point I also fix-up hyphenated words that straddle
page-boundaries. I note paragraphs that start in a new page and mark
them with
, and I note indented or block-quoted sections and mark
these with
..
. This helps when I go back to format it since I
can easily see where the special cases are.
Wordpad handles large documents reasonably well and will grok UNIX
files (ie:
only, not
). For this it rates 3.
PROOFING AND FORMATTING
When the whole text is assembled, whether by myself or by Distributed
Proofers, I use about the same process for formatting and final
proofing.
I use MS-Word 95 to do a spellcheck. This I rate 3 out of 5. I do a
select-all, and language appropriately - for me, usually UK rather
than American English. I wish I had a Canadian English dictionary for
Word 95, but have not needed one badly enough to actually look. Word
has a pretty good spell checker and the custom dictionaries are easy
to muck around with. I use a custom dictionary for any big project - I
have one for Chronicles of Canada, and different one for all the John
Richardson books I've done.
At this point in my personal process, I abandon Windows and go over to
FreeBSD.
I use vi (rated 9 out of 5) to do a number of hacks. I search for and
fix up hyphenations that were broken (peer- less) and such like. I
also search for and fix some OCR special case errors like 'you'->'yon'
and 'be'->'he'. This latter sometimes requires a while, just to step
through all the be and he's to see if they're right.
Still in vi, I next use some incantations to run the UNIX 'fmt'
command on each paragraph to get it reformatted. I use:
fmt -55 60
Fmt gets a 3 out-of 5 for what I need it for. It double spaces after
sentences, which--although it is probably the right thing to do--is
not the PG convention (for me at least). It also adds a space when
joining lines with an M-dash. I go back and fix both of these using
vi. I take into account the
tags and manually format
accordingly at this point.
As I reformat, I give the text it's final proofing. I'll have the
original text in-hand at this point, and will use the page markers
(remember them) to figure out where I am. As I reformat, I delete the
page markers and other markup. When I'm finished this step, the book
is almost done.
Next, I use Gutcheck 0.2 (5 of 5, for intended purpose - way to go
Jim!) to check for all the things it checks for. At this point I
usually get something like 50 hits, of which 30 are real. I'm then
back in vi, and fix up all those problems. Finally, I'm done.
As I go along, I tend to keep various versions of the document. I'm at
version 27 of 'The Imperialist' right now. Each scanning editing,
spell checking or whatever type of session gets a new version:
imperialist_12.txt, imperialist_13.txt,... At various times I might
find it useful to use 'wc', 'grep' and 'diff' to figure out what is
going on, where a word appears or whether I deleted something I didn't
mean to.
HARVESTING PAGE IMAGES
I mentioned above that I sometimes work from page images that I obtain
from the web. There are several archives around that hold eligible
materials as page images that you can easily download and OCR. I
personally have worked mainly with the Early Canadiana Online archive.
After a bit of poking around with the web interface to this
collection, I have been able to work out how the individual pages are
numbered and organized. I have written some shell scripts that I can
use to fetch all the pages of a volume and convert them from GIF to
TIFF format. Harvesting a 200 page book takes a few hours.
Once I have all the pages, I have to do some work with an image editor
to get them ready for OCR. I use Corel PhotoPaint 7 to crop each image
to just the text area and to remove the black bands at the sides due
to the spine or whatever. The page images are often made from
microfiche, and dust marks are common as well. These I can sometimes
edit out with PhotoPaint.
Because some of the page images, or certain sections thereof, can be
completely unreadable, I often find myself either tracking down a
modern edition or visiting a local university library to find a copy
of the book to look up a few paragraphs or passages that are not
readable in the images. Even having to do this, I find that the
capture of images from the archive is still a big time saver, and
allows me access to an edition that would otherwise be totally
inaccessible.
Having gathered the images and prepared them for OCR, I next submit
them to Charles at Distributed Proofers, or handle them myself, using
the same process as if I were scanning them.
DISTRIBUTED PROOFERS
I've done several books using Charles Franks' most excellent
Distributed Proofers web application. I tend to choose DP when I don't
have the personal time to read and proof a volume myself, or when the
poor quality of the text defies the ability of my (not very good) OCR
package.
When scanning for DP, I still scan images two-up. I then have a
collection of shell scripts that cut the page images in half to
produce single-page TIFF files. I then use a manual procedure with
Corel PhotoPaint 7 - if required - to fix up skewed pages or ones with
black margins. For the most part, page images that I scan myself are
registered exactly enough in my scan area that the page images don't
need to be edited.
Page images that I've harvested from a web archive do have to be fixed
up before they can be used by DP.
Charles, I believe, prefers that as a project manager I would deal
with my own OCR. He has, however, been kind enough to run several
batches of page images through his OCR setup for me to good effect. I
believe he uses Abbyy Finereader, and my procedure for submitting
pages to Charles is to run a subset of the pages I intent to send him
through a demo copy of Finereader to make sure that the results are
vaguely acceptable. If everything looks good, off it goes.
When the project has run its course with DP, I download the completed
text and proceed to format and re-proof it, for the most part, as if
I'd scanned and OCR'd it myself.
Jim Tinsley
How I (eventually) got started.
Five years ago, I was the most clueless newbie ever to try
volunteering for PG. If you're feeling lost about how to help PG, you
can be sure that you're not alone! And if I can write PG's first
complete FAQ after my bad start, you can surely do better! :-)
Back in 1997, the web site existed, but there were no FAQs, no
Volunteers' Board, no gutvol-d, no Distributed Proofing sites. I
started by making a donation and e-mailing Michael, suggesting that I
could help out with small jobs, or programming. I didn't get any, and
I had no idea what, if anything, I could usefully do by myself.
I looked up the in-progress list at the time, and e-mailed a few
people who were listed as working on books, offering to help. None of
them were still working on the books. (We no longer show people's
e-mail addresses on the InProg list.) I still had no idea how to get
eligible books, no scanner, and no idea how to approach producing an
etext.
I subscribed to the monthly Newsletter, and just read it for a year.
In a "Project Gutenberg Needs YOU" edition, Dianne Bean, the U.S.
Director of Production at the time, was given as a contact. I
e-mailed her, and finally things started happening.
She sent me a short piece to second-proof, and explained that I should
just fix whatever needed fixing. I returned it, and she introduced me
to Bill Brewer, who was, at the time, scanning Wisters like they were
going out of style. He and I formed a scanning/proofing team for a
while.
How I began producing, and my problems with scanning and OCR.
I had some ideas for books I wanted to produce, but I couldn't find
them locally, so I turned to the Internet, and discovered how easy it
is to find and buy used books on-line.
I bought a HP flatbed scanner. It came with freebie OCR software--
"PrecisionScan"--with images and OCR all in the same interface.
I scanned my first book, which fortunately had large, clear text, and
the OCR made a reasonable job of it, according to my standards at the
time, which were that getting any text at all without typing was a
form of magic :-)
I now know that I could have made a better job of it if I had pressed
the spine down hard, either closed the top to keep out ambient light
or darkened the room, and made each scan a bit more exact. I'm much
better at flatbed scanning now.
My PrecisionScan software _did_ recognize two facing pages, and dealt
with them correctly, though IIRC it put some garbage characters
between the pages that I had to remove by hand.
It did require a lot of editing, though, and recently I've gone back
over my original text and found lots of mistakes. Partly because of
the scan, partly because of my inexperience.
Throughout the editing, I kept having to make formatting decisions in
a vacuum, reinventing wheels and applying rules from a HowTo. Now,
having read and formatted and proofed and produced so many texts, I
just _know_ how to format a text without thinking, and just reading or
even skimming a few texts before producing my own would have given me
a lot of background and saved a lot of time. I had proofed several
books, but never thought to look closely at formatting decisions.
That text took me a month of working most evenings, and a lot of
sticktoitiveness. I can really appreciate the effort that a volunteer
has to put in to produce their first text by casting my mind back to
that month. I think it's the not-quite-knowing-what-you're-doing
that's the worst part. I remember being soooo relieved when I sent it
off for second proofing.
The guy who took it for second proofing didn't get back to me for a
month, and then said that he wasn't going to do it. This was
disappointing. I sent it to another guy for proofing. He came back
after a few weeks asking some questions. I answered them. After a few
more weeks, I followed up with another e-mail. No answer. A few weeks
after that, I gave up, and just submitted the file for posting.
The next book I produced didn't have such nice, clear, large type, and
the scan was what I would today call abysmal. I'd guess that I retyped
a quarter of the book. The less said about that one, the better.
My third book just _would not_ OCR sensibly. The print was very small
and faint, and the OCR produced gibberish. Even with my low standards,
I couldn't kid myself that this was working. I tried 400dpi, 600dpi.
No dice. I might get 10 complete words on a page.
It was at this point that I bought TextBridge. I really had no idea
about the difference between the freebie OCR programs they give away
with scanners and a genuine commercial product, but I was trying in
desperation to get _something_ different that would read this image.
Textbridge was an eye-opener for me. It still didn't make a good job
of the bad images, but it made a decent shot at maybe half of them,
and having bought it, I tried it on the two books I had worked so hard
at before--it gave hugely improved results. The book that had only
been about 75% OCRed became 100%, but with some errors. I cursed the
time I had wasted making up for the deficiencies of my freebie
package.
Since then, I've kept upgrading my TextBridge (I think I started on
version 8, now on Millennium) and bought OmniPage and Abbyy as well. I
mostly use Abbyy 6 now.
Last time I looked, there were downloadable trials of Abbyy,
TextBridge, and OmniPage. Big downloads though.
Last year, I got a new Epson Perfection 1640 scanner to replace my old
HP Scanjet. I never had any complaint about the Scanjet itself--it
served me well--but the new Epson is faster, has higher resolution,
and ADF.
Even better, I now know how to scan. I know how to process 200+ pages
an hour while scanning the book flat, two pages at a time. I know how
to adjust the settings to scan only the area covered by the book. I
try different settings for each new book to see what works.
So much for scanning and OCR. I was a _very_ slow learner in this
area.
How I prepare a text now.
I was never quite so bad on the proofing end of things. As an editor,
I use Brief in DOS and Crisp (a Brief clone) on Windows. (I mostly use
vi on *nix, but I do very little-to-no PG work on *nix apart from an
occasional scripting thing that I can do in one line of Perl, but
would be annoying on MS).
Now, I'm all for tolerance and equality and respect for the faiths of
other people, :-) but I gotta say that for someone who has used a
powerful editor, editing with Word or any standard Windows editor is
like scratching your nose with a rake.
When I first get the text off the OCR, I have many pages with breaks
between them, and usually no line-spacing between paragraphs, but each
paragraph indented.
I whip out Crisp, and run a macro to search and destroy all
page-breaks and page-numbers and blank lines between, and then another
to put line breaks between paragraphs and unindent them. Since I watch
this process carefully to avoid messing up quotations, it takes me
maybe 15 minutes.
Now I have a basically formatted text. The line-lengths are usually
too short, and there are hyphenated words at line-ends that I will
need to rejoin, and some that I need _not_ to rejoin. Another macro
fixes up the hyphenation. At each hyphen, I just decide whether to
rejoin or not. Say 20 minutes, max. Then I rewrap. Another 15 minutes.
So in maybe an hour I have a proofable text, and the really nice part
about it is that I've had a flying tour of the text three times, so
I've already noticed any peculiarities.
If I've noticed any unusual features like letters or poems that need
special treatment, I do it at this point.
To prepare the text for proofing, I just flick through it in Crisp
with spellquery on, in US or UK English as needed. This puts a red
line under queried words, just as Word does. I spend maybe 5 or 10
seconds per 50-line screenful. I don't expect to catch them all; this
is just a quick pass to thin 'em out. I may also catch some formatting
issues, but I'm not looking for them.
Now I proofread.
I've tried lots of ways of proofreading. Often it's just sitting at
the screen. Sometimes I print out the texts or parts of it, and mark
errata with a pen. Occasionally, I get the computer to read the text
to me, and I follow along in the book, noting any errors. (This is
good when you want very high accuracy - do a replace of ":" with
"colon", "," with "comma" and so forth before you start the reader.)
Recently, I've tried reading the text on a PDA, and bookmarking the
problems.
Whatever way I do it, it takes time. I'm better at it now than I was,
but I still tend to miss things like he/be.
Some people swear by particular fonts for proofreading, saying that
font X shows "1"https://www.gutenberg.org/"l" differences more clearly than font Y. I just use
Arial or Verdana for printouts and Courier or Fixedsys on screen; the
special fonts don't seem to make a difference to me.
So I've finished proofing and made my corrections. Now I leave it sit
for a few days. I need to get my mind off it, so that I won't miss the
same errors I missed before.
When I come back to it, I'm looking at what software people would call
a Release Candidate, and something changes in my head . . . I'm
thinking of it in a different mode, not as a work-in-progress, but as
a potential finished project. This makes me much more critical, and
less willing to accept mistakes.
Usually there are dash-problems to fix up (emdashes as " - " instead
of "--") and other minor stuff like that. I do global searches for
" -" and "- " and "...".
I do a quick skim though it, sampling paragraphs here and there as a
test of its quality. I make any formatting adjustments like chapter
line spacing or indenting letters that I might notice.
Then I run gutcheck. Gutcheck is a little program I wrote / write /
will-write over the years that complains about common problems in a PG
text . . . bad line-lengths, common typos, numbers within words (like
the "1" in "wor1d") unbalanced quotations, spaced or unspaced
punctuation, non-ASCII characters. I fix the problems that Gutcheck
points out.
Again, I switch spellquery on in Crisp, and skim through, more slowly
than the first time. This time, I'm looking for _anything_ that
shouldn't be in a PG text.
I run gutcheck again, just to be sure.
And off it goes!
The Posting Team
For a couple of years, I churned out a text regularly every two months,
spending about 40 hours on each, and took on some occasional proofing,
but after I became moderator of the Volunteers' Board, people started
referring texts to me for checking or reformatting. This took up more
and more of my available PG time, and my own production slowed
accordingly.
It was in response to these requests that I wrote gutcheck, which
embodies all the standard non-spelling checks I would run on a file.
Gutcheck allowed me to spend less time on each text, but still feel
reasonably sure that there was nothing glaringly wrong with it.
When Michael formed the Posting Team last year, I volunteered, and it
was a natural progression for me, since I was already used to doing a
lot of last-minute work on texts.
I found posting to be disorienting and confusing at first; people
bombard you with half-scraps of information about books to be posted;
some texts need serious work; some texts haven't been cleared, and
need to be referred back; some people want special treatment for
their texts, which may conflict either with my views or with PG
precedents, or both; there are lots of questions. But like every
other new job, it just takes time to learn the ropes.
The actual process of posting now takes very little time: I can go
through the necessary steps in 3-5 minutes. But posters are the last
line of defense against errors, and even the most careful volunteers
make them (and yes, we do too!). It takes a minimum of 15 minutes to
run standard checks on a perfectly clean file, and it can take several
hours to fix up a file that needs help. On average, it takes me about
an hour to do my reasonable best for every text submitted.
Apart from posting proper, there are a lot of queries to be answered,
many of which I hope I've dealt with in this FAQ, "special cases"
that eat as much time as I'm willing to give them, corrections to be
made to existing texts, and interminable debates about whether PG
should do _this_ or _that_.
Now that the learning curve is past, the problem with posting is
that it generates a lot of e-mail and discussion, and eats a lot
of time, and is a 7-day-a-week commitment. Having posted over a
thousand texts, I'm now particularly interested in ways to improve
text quality.
John Mamoun
How to create an e-text efficiently or automatically is an interesting
logistical problem. Here is my procedure, which I recently used to
make an e-text in about a week, with maybe 6 man-hours of work on my
part:
I take the book, and use an x-acto blade to cut out all of the pages.
I then feed the pages into an HP 4C scanner with an automatic document
feeder accessory attachment that I got from e-bay for $200. I feed it
up to 50 pages at a time, and it automatically scans them in.
I work the scanner using software called scan2000, from
www.informatik.com (30-day shareware trial period, $50 to register).
This program automatically works with the scanner to save each image
as a CCITT4 standard format TIFF file. Most importantly, it
automatically numbers each page, starting with an initial value you
specify (typically 001.tif) and increasing the number of the file name
by an increment you specify (typically by 2 pages, since you scan
double sided pages; you scan the evens first, then flip the pages over
and scan the odds, but you want the page numbers in order, right?). So
the scanner outputs, say, 001.tif, 003.tif, 004.tif, etc., then you
flip the pages over and re-feed them into the scanner; the even pages
are saved as 002.tif, 004.tif, etc., after you tell the program to
begin the first of the even page files with 002.tif.
So now I have a bunch of consecutively numbered CCITT4 TIFF files. At
this point, I could use a freeware program called cc42 (search for it
at www.pdfzone.com) to combine all of the sequentially numbered CCITT4
TIF files into a single PDF file with the pages in order.
Or, if making e-texts, not PDF files, I OCR the pages and save them as
corresponding pages like 001.txt, 002.txt, etc. I also use Paint Shop
Pro (shareware 30 day trial) to batch-convert the tiff files into GIF
file format. I can then upload the GIF files and the correspondingly
numbered text files to the Distributed Proofreaders page
(http://texts01.archive.org/dp/) to have them rapidly proofread by
numerous proofreaders, who finish the task at a rate of 50-100 pages a
day per book, very roughly speaking. When done, I then download the
text files as a single text file combining all of the files. The
upload function on the DP site is tedious, requiring one to upload
each file one-by-one, but I spoke to the webmaster recently, and he
said there are, with special arrangements, ways to FTP them or even
e-mail them to him on CD.
Now, hard returns. It was once a grave problem to fix hard returns so
that the text outputted to 65 characters per line. Then I got a
freeware program called Clipcase at www.shareware.com. With Clipcase,
you select a body of text (about 20 pages or so; any more, and the
program crashes) in your word processor, copy the text to the
clipboard, then load up Clipcase, paste the text into the Clipcase
window, the process the text.
When this happens, all of the hard carriage returns within the text
are eliminated, EXCEPT for returns between paragraphs. Then, you
select the text, copy it, and paste it into any word processor to
process it. I use Microsoft Word. After pasting all of the text into
it, I select all of the text, choose Courier New font, 10 point size,
and set the margins at 5.5 inches. With this setup, when the text is
saved as "Text with layout," the resultant text is 65 characters per
line, every line. Setting hard returns is automatic.
Then I spell-check the text, and also skim through it to look for
typos and "categories" of errors to tend to occur repeatedly within
the text. One common error is having a single dash instead of two
dashes, for example:
He lingered-slowly.
as opposed to: He lingered--slowly.
Another common error is a space between a period, exclamation mark or
other punctuation mark, and the letter that came before it, such as:
Hey !
instead of Hey!
or " Hey, "
instead of "Hey,"
I then use the "Find/Replace" command within Microsoft Word to
efficiently get rid of these. For example, I might tell it to look for
^w", where ^w means "a white space" and " is a quote. This looks for
white spaces before quotes. "^w looks for white spaces after quotes.
^w! means a white space before an exclamation mark. I can also have it
look for "any letter"-"any letter," so that it finds single dashes
between letters, and then I can decide if I want to replace these with
double dashes. By using these kinds of find/replace tricks, it becomes
easier to remove typos.
When done, I save as "text with line breaks" and it is done.
That's basically my procedure. 1 week turnaround time and 6 man-hours
on my part for a 190k text file...
Ken Reeder
The Story of My Life (as pertains to PG) by Ken Reeder
June, 2002
I am currently finishing up my fourth etext, with two more etexts in
process, another seven books sitting on the shelf waiting, and a lot
of additional books that I would like to do when those are done.
Sixteen months ago I was blissfully unaware of PG and of the world of
online books. A couple of things seemed to come together to lead to my
involvement with PG. I spent some time helping one of my sons, for a
school project, in an unsuccessful search for an online English
translation of Pliny's Historia Naturalis. About a year before that I
had been tinkering, for no particular reason, with trying to type one
of my favorite older sci-fi books into a text file. And I had been
thinking, occasionally over the course of a few years, about a series
of books to which I was avidly devoted when I was about twelve or
fourteen years old, which was widely available then but is relatively
scarce now. It was a web search on the name of that author, Joseph
Altsheler, which happened to lead me to some couple-year-old messages
on the PG volunteers' bulletin board.
I poked around the PG web site a little and thought, hey, I think I
could be interested in this. Only a few months before I had, for no
particular reason, picked up a clearance-model parallel flatbed
scanner (for which I paid $36, including shipping). The scanner
package included some OCR software, so I already had the basics needed
to scan a book to produce an etext.
So I rummaged around on the PG web site a good bit more, and lurked on
the volunteers' board, and figured out that I could find the books
that I wanted on Ebay or ABEbooks, and bought a couple of books for
$10 or $15 each. I scanned a chapter or two and tried out the OCR,
which worked very well. (The OCR software that came with my scanner is
TextBridge Pro, which it turns out is one of the more highly-regarded
OCR packages, so I was just lucky in that respect because I had no
clue. I could see that the OCR software was clearly much better than
some DOS software that I had used at work about 15 years ago.)
What appealed to me was that, firstly, it seemed like this was a
worthwhile thing to do, with a big plus being that you can do the work
from your own home, in your pajamas if you want, in whatever time you
can spare. And I thought that, being a detail-oriented
software-developer geek kind of guy, that I would kind of enjoy it and
also be pretty good at it - actually, I've always had an aptitude for
proof-reading.
So I went ahead and mailed in a couple TP&V for copyright clearance,
and set out to actually produce my first etext, a 348-page book which
I completed in about 10 weeks, start to finish.
For a book with nice clear, good-sized print, I figure that it
averages out to about 7 or 8 minutes per page to go through my
complete production process. Some of the books that I am working on,
with smaller or less-perfect print (and/or other complications) take a
little (or a lot) longer.
I feel that I've got my process pretty well set by now. I've put
together several little home-made utility programs, written in FoxPro,
which assist me. (I've put in some effort to try to adapt some of
these for possible use by others, but the problems are that it takes a
lot more work to polish software to the point that I feel comfortable
letting somebody else pound on it, and the scope of what I think the
software ought to do gets bigger every time I work on it, and it's not
nearly as enjoyable - for somebody who develops software at work every
day - as producing etexts.)
My complete production process, with rough time breakdown, is as
follows:
1. Scan the book, 2 pages at a time, about 1 minute per scan (30
seconds per page). (I do not cut the pages out of the book, I
just lay it flat on the scanner and press down on the spine.)
2. Run the BMP file through TextBridge Pro, about 30 seconds per
page. (Again, when working with clear, good-sized print.) I
save the output as text with no line breaks.
3. Run a little FoxPro utility that I wrote that massages and
formats the file a little bit.
4. Do my first-pass proof-read, about 2 minutes per page, combining
the pages into chapters.
5. Run another little FoxPro utility, which checks for some things
that I might have missed during proof-reading.
6. Use MS Word to perform a spelling and grammar check, another 30
to 60 seconds per page.
7. Run another little FoxPro utility (number 3), which inserts line
breaks, then run another one (number 4) which does some more
exception-checking.
8. Do my second-pass proof-read, about 2 minutes per page.
9. Combine the chapters into one big file. Run a couple more little
FoxPro utilities (numbers 5 and 6) which do some final formatting,
checking and analysis.
10. Send the file to Jim Tinsley, who will graciously run it through
his GUTCHECK program which scans for a lot of common errors.
11. Call it an etext and send it in for posting.
My primary goal is to produce a quality etext - I don't particularly
care about trying to speed things up. I mean, I don't want to
needlessly waste a lot of time, but I look at this as a hobby and I
enjoy working on it, so I don't get out my stop watch to see if I can
get 20 pages done faster today than yesterday. (When I go out running,
then I'm concerned about whether I'm faster today than yesterday.) I
generally put in maybe 5 hours a week on PG - actually, it's often
easier for me to fit in some PG work on weekday evenings than on the
weekend. And it is definitely gratifying when the etext is done and
not only does it get posted on PG, but then links and copies pop up in
different places like the "Online Books Page", and DMOZ.org, and
Blackmask.com and Bookshare.org.
I have not encountered any real stumbling blocks so far. There were a
few things that took some time to figure out. For example, when my
first etext was ready, I was pretty sure that it was expected that I
would put the PG header on myself, but I looked all over the web site
and could not find a "master" copy. (Actually, I think the master,
such as it was/is, is available on Lyris, but I was not subscribing to
Lyris then.) So I just pulled the header from a very-recently posted
etext, but then after I sent the etext in it was posted with a
different header anyway. (Nowadays, my understanding is that the PG
"staff" prefers to put the header on.) I also spent some time
researching 8-bit code pages, but I expect that the new big-FAQ will
provide easy access to all the answers that I had to hunt down then.
There's a lot of good information buried in past messages on the
volunteers' board, but no good way to search out information on a
particular topic.
So far I've been able to fill all my book needs without spending much
money. I find my books through ABEbooks, or from Ebay, plus I've
gotten a few at Ohio Book Store downtown on Main Street. I've rarely
paid as much as $20 for a book, even including shipping. There's one
book that I've purchased (but not yet started work on) which costs
$1000 or more for the original edition, but which is also available in
paperback reprints for about $10. There are some other books in my
future plans which look like they will be more expensive, but we'll
worry about that when the time comes.
My wife still cannot understand why I spend my time scanning books,
whereas my kids (and, I guess, most other people I know) seem to think
it's a little eccentric but basically acceptable behavior. Personally,
I definitely enjoy producing etexts and hope to keep doing so for a
long time. My thanks to Michael Hart, Jim Tinsley, Greg Newby, and
untold others who devote so much effort to nurture the project and
grease the skids for the rest of us. Long live Project Gutenberg.
Lynn Hill
I have been involved with PG since 1994, when I first began reading
texts on-line during slow times at the office where I worked. (I once
got into trouble with a co-worker when she found me "processing"
Little Women instead of the week's payroll report.) I was surprised to
find, even then, such a wide variety of material in the PG archives. I
found myself re-reading favorite books from my childhood, and
delighting in finding "new" ones--Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret
Garden, Heidi, the Oz stories. They were not at all like the sugary
old films I had seen on television. They were funny, heartwarming, and
utterly charming. After some years as a reader of the texts, I found
myself thinking, "I'd like to try this."
When I first checked out the web page for volunteers, I felt
overwhelmed. There were all sorts of FAQ's, but when I read them, I
was baffled by all the information about file types, fonts, and other
details. I didn't even know where to get books, let alone what to do
about jagged rights edges or indented lines. It was frustrating -- I
had all this enthusiasm but didn't know where to apply it. I dawdled
for some months, then came back and turned to the PG Volunteers'
message board for help.
Help came from many sources. I found someone who needed a file
proofread, so I offered to read it. This worked out well, and I even
found a couple of typos in it. I proofed some more files for this
person, and then some for other people on the board.
After a while, I was ready to try a whole book -- and from Dianne Bean
came my first PG book, "The Golden Slipper" by Anna Katharine Green.
When I opened the box, a stale smell floated out, and then I found a
chunky book with the ugliest green cover I've ever seen on anything.
The date was 1915, and the book was starting to crumble all around the
edges. My first reaction was "Who would ever want to read this???" But
since I had promised to do it, I dutifully started scanning and
reading as I went along. The book was a collection of mystery/suspense
stories about a teenage crime-stopper named Violet Strange. (I always
felt as if Scooby Doo and his friends might turn up at any moment.) As
I read, I began to like Violet, and to notice how different her world
seemed from ours. By the time I reached the end of the book, I felt
proud of myself for "saving" some good stories for the future, and
ready to try another book.
My suggestion to new PG'ers is to jump in and not be shy about
volunteering. PG is a big group of great people who care, but they do
not know you are out there until you say something. Once you speak up,
they will do anything short of triple backflips to help you.
There are many ways new folks can join in, from scavenging old books
at yard sales all the way up to proofing files or scanning and typing
in whole books. When you send in your first copy of title page and
verso, be patient -- it takes time for your copyright research to be
done. This is a great time to do proofing on-line at one of the
distributed proofreading web sites.
I get my books from library sales, yard sales, friends I met on the PG
Volunteer board, and even from elderly neighbors who wanted to lend me
favorite books they have saved. When you want old books, tell
everybody you know. They may come up with a lot of eligible books you
wouldn't have expected.
When you find an old book, my second piece of advice is not to be too
hasty in deciding whether you want to read it or not. Old books are
dated, naturally, but they can show you things about life in the past
which you can't pick up from an A&E documentary. I am especially
interested in the way women and children are portrayed in these old
books--every woman is not necessarily a lady, and every child is not a
sweet little angel. (If you haven't read Little Lord Fauntleroy, you
are missing a lot of laughs.) These insights and ideas can keep you
going through a lot of long dark winter evenings, and they're handy to
think over when you hit the occasional dull chapter or scene.
My hardest text to do was See America First, by Orville Heistand. The
author invites readers to join him on a trip from Ohio to
Massachusetts, in which he visits several landmarks and historical
sites and entertains you all the way with obscure poetry, proverbs,
and little moral lectures about each rock and robin he encounters. I
told my husband, Chris, that the author's (literally) rambling style
was driving me crazy. Chris proofread some chapters for me, then
commented, "Boy, you never see anybody these days have such a fun time
going nowhere!"
By now, I've done nine complete texts, and have boxes of other books
to do. I have found that children's books are my favorites, but I will
try anything if it is clear enough to read. I don't work on PG every
day, or even every week if I get too busy with other things, but I
keep coming back. I find PG projects to be very relaxing, a way to use
my computer and writing/proofing skills, and also a refreshing change
from my daily work. It's also a great excuse and motivation to read
lots of books!
Sandra Laythorpe
HOW I STARTED AS A GUTENBERG VOLUNTEER
I first learned about Project Gutenberg from a Computer magazine, so I
searched for it on the Internet, and found all these classic books I
had wanted to read for years, and they were free! At that time, I read
a paperback copy of The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M Yonge. I
thought it was a wonderful book - indeed I still think it is the best
novel to come out of the nineteenth century. After reading the 'How
To' files on the Gutenberg site, I thought maybe I could produce Miss
Yonge's books with the equipment I had. I wrote to Michael Hart and
asked him, and got a very positive reply and lots of information from
him.
I jumped in the deep end! I bought a very old copy of The Heir of
Redclyffe, sent the photocopies of the title pages to Michael, and sat
down at the computer, learned to use my OCR facilities, and got on
with it, learning by my mistakes. The Instruction files told me most
of what I needed to know, and Michael gave me an introduction to David
Price, an experienced Gutenberger, who would be able to help me. He
has been invaluable in explaining things; I don't think I could have
produced my first attempt without his guiding hand.
I buy my books off the Internet, or from local dealers. Most of Miss
Yonge's work is still available from second-hand bookshops, and I am
happily living in a location where they are not too scarce. I have
Gutenberg colleagues, now, helping with CMY, and I post books to them
snail-mail, if they can't buy them in their own countries.
THIS IS HOW _I_ DO IT.
I use PrimaPage OCR program; it was on the disc which came with my
Primax Colorado Direct scanner, and I do the work on my PC. Before I
start, I open my scanner program, and adjust the settings to take
black and white photos, and the brightness to about minus 35 or 40.
This is crucial, as I won't even be able to _see_ the page until I get
it right. When I first began, it took many adjustments to get it
right. There should be as few mistakes as possible on the OCR result.
If the photograph is too light, the OCR reads words wrongly. If the
photograph is too dark, there are shadows which create black patches
on the pages. If I can't get rid of these black patches, I have to
tear the pages out of the book and do them one at a time. Important:
don't buy first editions!
I use the scanner to take a photograph of two pages. The photograph
appears on the screen. Then I close the photograph, which my computer
calls 'untitl1'. Next I open my OCR program, and search for file
'untitl1', and open that. Then I ask the program to clean it, and then
I click onto the button that 'reads' the photograph and converts in
from pixels into letters = Optical Character Recognition!
When I get the OCR result (which takes only a few seconds), I save the
'read' text file into my own documents, numbering the file the same as
the number of the page of the book. I have created a folder called
'Gutenberg', and I save it in there in a text-only format. So I go to
my Gutenberg folder, open this new file, and visually correct the
mistakes. I save the finished page, create a Chapter 1 file, and save
it and subsequent pages that I have prepared, to build up the whole
book. After I have proofed the OCR result, I paste the finished text
into a Microsoft Word document, setting the font at Courier New size
10. This sets the lines at the right length for Gutenberg. When I have
finished the whole book in Word, I save it as text-with-line-breaks,
to get the final text file, which I send to be posted on the Gutenberg
site. I proof my work two or three times, depending on the quality of
the OCR result, and do a final spelling check with MS Word. I don't
ask other people to proof my texts, because Miss Yonge's
idiosyncrasies are liable to get edited out, unless the proofer has
the book to hand.
It took me 6 months to prepare my first text, The Heir of Redclyffe,
but I can do 10 pages an hour now.
In my Gutenberg folder, I have other useful files for reference,
mostly downloaded Gutenberg Instructions files. So if I need to find
something out, I can look in these files--it is much easier than
searching on the Internet. If I need to know something I can't find in
these files, I may ask a question on the Volunteers WWW Board,
although I try not to, because the answers are nearly always in the
files.
I try to process 2 sheets of 16 octavo pages a day, taking about 3 or
4 hours. I do my housework & gardening in the morning, then settle
down to an afternoon's happy Gutenberging :-).
WHY DO I GUTENBERG?
When I became semi-retired, I wanted to do some voluntary work on the
Internet. Coincidentally I began reading the works of Charlotte M
Yonge, and discovered that most of her works are out of print now. I
felt that they deserved a much wider audience, so I decided that my
voluntary job would be to do just that. Miss Yonge lived in a village
only a couple of miles away from me, so I had a local interest, too.
On my web page, http://www.menorot.com/cmyonge.htm, you will find out
a little about her, and Otterbourne, the village she lived in all her
life, and find links to other web sites about her.
I discovered the Charlotte M Yonge Fellowship http://www.cmyf.org.uk/
and am now in contact with other people who appreciate her work,
including academics who write clever things about her. Her books are
about families, their interactions with each other, and how they, in
Christian terms, grow in grace. I don't think there is another writer
who can write so well about families. She was a Tractarian, a
Christian who, in the nineteenth century, believed that people could
be influenced for good by what they read. For this reason, 20th
century people found her characters too moralistic, and her prose too
turgid. I think her novels are delightful, her characters lovable, and
her prose is minutely descriptive. It was said about her that she was
'able to make goodness exciting'. This is a rare talent, perhaps only
found in other Christian writers like John Bunyan or Charles Kingsley.
Through the Gutenberg site, Miss Yonge's works are more easily
available than ever. She originally wrote for upper and middle class
young women. Even though I live a century and a half later, I can
recognise her characters in their 'descendants' who live around me,
but I sometimes wonder what Chinese, African, or even modern American
readers think of her, their own backgrounds so different from the
English Victorians.
I enjoy making Gutenberg texts, the work is simple, once you know how
to. I would prefer, however, to see them presented in HTML. The modern
ebooks all need to be in HTML format to present nicely on their tiny
pages. I believe Gutenberg is going to publish HTML files, I would
like to learn how to do it. Eventually, I think Gutenberg files will
be available in a format that will work on all PCs, handhelds, palms,
and ebooks;--but I don't know what that format is yet, I don't think
standards have even been worked out among the ebook publishers.
Finally, yes, I do find mistakes in my published texts. When I have
finished all 200+ of Miss Yonge's books, I am going to go through them
all for the second time, and remove the mistakes. So, my work is cut
out for many years to come. . . .
Suzanne Shell
Over the past several years, I visited the Project Gutenberg
website occasionally, looked at what was involved in making a
significant contribution to the effort, and left after downloading a
few books--PG was a project that would need to wait until I
retired.
In the summer and fall of 2002, I was doing research on e-books
(sources, devices, costs) for my library, and ran across Distributed
Proofreaders. I discovered Blackmask.com at about this time, and
also followed a link from there to Distributed Proofreaders.
Serendipity! After backing away a few times, I took the plunge and
registered on November 5, then began proofing. The
however-many-pages-I-wanted-to-proof commitment was just right for
letting me get a feel for the process, and to start me thinking of
the ways I could exploit all this free labor to get the books _I_
wanted into PG.
I was feeling quite virtuous about proofing my 10-20 pages per
day, when I visited the site on November 8, and NONE of the books I
was working on were available. Also there was this perfectly absurd
number listed for number of proofers having proofed at least one
page (it had roughly quadrupled). I KNEW the site had been hacked.
Actually the site had been slash dotted. The DP discussion forums
were so active, it was hard to find time to read all the messages,
questions, suggestions, and complaints; these rapidly led to new
documentation and more detailed proofing guidelines. Books moved
through the site so rapidly that they brought out the "hard stuff"
from the bottom of the to-do stack, and were STILL desperate for
content. I was a relative "veteran" after just a few days, and
helped out a little by answering questions, but I was still a
beginner. I had some PG dreams that DP could make reality, but I
needed to learn the ropes first.
Some of my ambitions revolved around professional goals--there
are some public domain titles, which, if available in electronic
form, would be extremely useful to my library's patrons. There are
also some standard reference books and indexes--Granger's Index to
Poetry is one example--that have pre-1923 editions that could still
be important resources. In order to learn what I needed to know
about providing content, though, I decided to start with something
less overwhelming (wanting to read it on my e-book reader was just a
coincidence). I went to my bookshelves and pulled out my P. G.
Wodehouse reprints. I downloaded and read the scanning and
submitting FAQ from the DP site, requested and received clearance
for the first book (_Uneasy Money_) in late December, and got to
work mastering my scanner. I tried Omnipage Pro first, but decided
that ABBYY Finereader Pro did a significantly better job of the OCR.
I offered to be a "behind the scenes" manager for the book while it
worked its way through the site, but was made an official "Project
Manager" instead. Although the first frenzy following the slash dot
invasion had calmed down, DP was still feeling a need for more
content and more hands to manage projects.
On January 5, _Uneasy Money_ started proofing; it went through 2
rounds of proofing in less than 20 hours. I felt a like a hick
marveling at a traffic light changing colors, but I sat at my PC and
watched the page count go down. By this time, I had also scanned and
OCR'd a couple more Wodehouse reprints and a short book of poetry. I
was hooked! Juliet Sutherland and the other admins had recruited
some experienced DP'ers to help train new post-processors in the job
of preparing final PG texts. I was handed over to one of them. After
several projects, I "graduated" and was given permission to upload
my own projects. My intent was to do 3 or 4 projects a month, no
more than I could handle post-processing by myself. I planned to
process an occasional reference book in addition to all the
Wodehouse I could get my hands on. So much for plans...
One ongoing concern of many Distributed Proofreaders was how to
train new volunteers in the DP style of proofreading. (It is
somewhat idiosyncratic because of the distributed nature of the
process.) We were still coping with the aftereffects of the massive
influx of slash dotters--quantity benefited, but quality suffered.
Super7, one of the highest volume proofreaders, suggested setting
aside a project without complex formatting for "Beginners" and
asking that the second round proofers (all of whom should be
veterans) send feedback and encouragement to the newcomers. This was
tried successfully, and with a couple of variations. Since I had
been planning to start running a variety of genre fiction through
the site, I then volunteered to manage these as beginners' projects
for as long as the supply held out. All of a sudden, starting in
February 2003, the amount of time I needed to spend locating,
scanning, OCR'ing and managing books increased drastically, and the
amount of time I could devote to post-processing decreased. Luckily,
"veterans" stepped in to answer newcomers' questions, and to serve
as "Mentors" in the second round of proofing. Recently, others have
provided "beginners' projects", to help keep up with the demand of a
steadily increasing flow of new volunteers. These projects are also
useful for helping new post-processors learn the job.
I still have some ambitious projects planned; Granger's _Index to
Poetry_, the unabridged edition of _The Golden Bough_, Curtis' _The
North American Indian_, and the _Book Review Digest_ (volumes for
1905-1921). A couple of volumes are already waiting to be proofed,
others are waiting to be scanned on the PG tabloid scanner. But, in
the meantime, there are 23 new Wodehouse books in PG thanks to
Distributed Proofreaders, not to mention such remnants of early 20th
century popular culture as _The Sheik_.
I believe that a major accomplishment of Distributed Proofreaders
has been the creation of way to provide on-the-job training for PG
volunteers. Steady improvement in the quantity and quality of
training techniques and documentation, enhancements to the
user-friendliness of the site, and ready access to the collective
experience and advice of a wide range of volunteers in the Forums
have resulted in a growing core of active and experienced volunteers
in all the facets of e-book production. I'm sure that I could not
have progressed from a total newbie to a regular PG contributor
within a 5-month period without this support structure. Regular
communication and collaboration with book-lovers from around the
world has enriched my life. The fact that it is easier to get leave
from my job than from DP, is perhaps beside the point...
Tony Adam
How did you learn about PG?
It's been so long, I don't really remember! I probably read about it
on a library listserv (I'm a librarian), and since making old texts
accessible has always been a concern of mine, I jumped right in.
What was your first contact like?
Great! Mike Hart has always been easy to deal with via e-mail,
although we've never talked. He and the "crew du jour" directed
me to the FAQ and I took it from there.
What was the first PG job you did? How did it go?
My first job might have been Henry James' _Turn of the Screw_ (I
just found a note from September 1993 on copyright clearance for it).
Since in a former incarnation I was editorial assistant for the _Henry
James Review_, I thought that would be a good start. I've always typed
the files (I'm a fast typist), and I think we had few problems along
the way.
How did you develop your PG experience from there?
Helter-skelter, much like my reading habits. I work at a historically
black university, so getting 19th C African-American works posted is a
central concern. I've done _Clotelle_ (the first A-A American novel)
and the autobiography of Henry O. Flipper, the West Point cadet, and
I'm always looking for something new in that area. Somewhere along the
way I got sidetracked into essays by Whittier and other U.S. poets,
and I've collaborated on early American historical documents and Sir
Walter Scott with a fellow PGer up in Ohio and Chinese documents with
another contact in Japan. A couple of years ago, I saw that someone in
San Francisco needed help with the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and that has
occupied my time on and off since. It's always something!
Can you tell us about the first text you produced?
I think it was _The Turn of the Screw_, which was
a good starting point--not too long, a good read, etc. Just plugging
away at the text a few pages a day made the process go quickly.
Why do you spend your hours contributing to PG?
I love the idea of making all of this print knowledge available to
anyone anywhere. Working in a library that has suffered budget
problems over the years opened my eyes to the need for acquisition of
as much free stuff as possible for our students and faculty. Besides,
in a perverse way, it's fun!
Do you specialize in any particular kind of work? of texts?
I've probably focused more on plays, historical documents, and
19th C U.S. works than anything else.
What do you like about making a PG text?
Having a project come to fruition--finally seeing an almost forgotten
text come to life again.
What do you dislike about making a PG text?
The work can be tedious at times, depending on the author. But
sometimes you have to plow through to get something significant
processed. For example, we probably should have more philosophers
represented, but what a horrible thing it would be to scan Kant!
Where do you get your eligible books?
Mostly from my library's collection, although I finally purchased my
own copy of the Shakespeare Apocrypha (it's very hard to find, which
makes it very suitable for posting). I've interlibrary loaned some
items, but that's also been unusual.
Do you type or scan? What Scanner / OCR / Editor / WP do you prefer?
I still type everything--it's easier when working with a play, I've
discovered. But I'm purchasing a scanner in the very near future and
will do more with that.
How do you check your text? Any special tools? spellchecker? Do you
print it out and read it? Put it on your PDA and read it? Have a voice
synthesis program read it aloud to you from your PC?
I usually run it through the spellchecker, although depending on the
work, I read it line by line a second time.
Do you have any tips'n'tricks or special routines you go through when
preparing a text?
The best thing to do is put yourself on a schedule--do a set amount of
pages every day, and you'll be surprised how quickly you get to the
end. I also make a pencil mark in the book at a stopping point and
even read back a paragraph to double check what I last entered.
How long does it take you to make a text?
Depends on my work schedule, other assignments, time of year, etc. A
play might take a couple of weeks, but a Walter Scott novel could take
six months. I think my record is probably one day for an essay, but
that's unusual.
Do you work alone, or do you share the work of each text? Does anyone
regularly help you proof the text?
I've worked alone and on teams, depending on the text. No one
regularly helps to proof the text, but occasionally someone else does.
Do you do some PG work regularly, or drift in and out as opportunity
permits, or when you feel like it?
I consider myself a regular, as time permits. In other words, I
haven't dropped out of the picture, but sometimes I might not enter
anything for up to a month.
How many different kinds of work, or different books, have you done?
Not sure how many different books I've done, but it's been a wide
variety: James' and Scott's novels, Whittier's essays, a whole
collection of early American documents (mostly New Netherlands),
Shakespeare (accepted canon and the apocryphal works), some odd works
(_The Psychology of Beauty_ comes to mind)--the list goes on and on.
I've even forgotten that I've done some titles!
What do you like about the PG process?
That it's open-ended--if I think I have something that should be
posted, I don't have to jump through hoops and ladders to get
permission (other than copyright clearance).
What do you dislike about the PG process?
Can't think of anything offhand.
Is there anything you'd like to see PG doing differently?
I know it's a bone of contention, but we probably need to explore
moving away from ASCII.
If one of your friends approached you to ask advice about how to get
started contributing to PG, what would you tell them?
Start with something fun, that's close to your heart, and keep
plugging away a little bit at a time.
What do you expect Project Gutenberg to be like in 5 years? 10 years?
We'll probably be a whole lot bigger (texts and personnel), with a
different look to the texts. Maybe we'll even have more audio versions
of texts, using some of the new software that's coming out.
Tonya Allen
I discovered Project Gutenberg in about 1997. After several years of
enjoying PG's texts, in June of 2002 I decided it was time to start
contributing. Via the PG web site I learned that the easiest way to
do this would be to help out with proofreading via Charles Franks'
Distributed Proofreaders web site. The day I signed on I proofed
nine whole pages of a children's book called _Curly and Floppy
Twistytail_ and felt very proud to be contributing.
At that time, there were probably only about 40 active volunteers
on the site each day. Often I proofed an entire book almost all by
myself over the course of a week or so. Things moved at a leisurely
pace; guidelines were few and simple; and I had fun reading old
books and discovering new authors.
After a few months a request was made for volunteers to post-process
texts in French. I volunteered to help with this, and that was how I
became a post-processor (PPer). Shortly afterwards, the web page
listing texts available for post-processing and sign-out was
unveiled. I remember several times checking and being disappointed
because there was nothing currently available (hard to imagine now
when there are always at least 40 texts waiting).
One day in November, I picked out a likely-looking text from the
proofing page, and settled down for an hour of reading. As I recall,
it was _The Greek View of Life_, a sizeable text of which only a few
pages had been proofed so far, and which I thought would last for
several days at least. At about that time, someone emailed me to say
that DP had been "https://www.gutenberg.org/.ed." "What does that mean?" I replied. I soon
found out.
I had been proofing away peacefully for awhile when suddenly instead
of the next page, I got a page about twenty pages further on. The
same thing happened again and again, and suddenly all the pages were
gone; the whole text had been completed. DP had indeed been
slashdotted.
Since then, a lot of amazing things have happened. The number of
active volunteers per day has increased almost 1000%. The number of
texts that go through the site has increased exponentially. All
kinds of proofing and processing tools have been developed. I now
spend most of my time checking texts that others have PPed, and
submitting them to PG, at an average rate of one to four per
day--quite a leap from nine pages of _Curly and Floppy Twistytail_.
And I'm looking forward to everything that lies ahead as DP
continues to evolve.
Walter Debeuf
Quite by chance I became aware of PG when I was surfing and looking
for interesting sites. I vaguely knew the name because I had heard of
the Project a long time ago. After reading the "History and Philosophy
of PG", I immediately became wildly enthusiastic about it. This was
what I had been looking for for years, a meaningful use of my PC, and
because I am a fervent lover of good literature, I didn't hesitate to
contact the founders of the Project. I made a suggestion that I should
work on French and Dutch e-texts. The very same day I received an
answer from PG in which they told me they were very pleased with my
contribution but that I had to keep in mind that all books must be
free of copyright and published before 1923.
This wasn't so great. . . . After I browsed in the "Help And FAQ" of
the PG site, I read that I didn't have to worry about all that,
because they are willing to do all the clearance!
On my own bookshelf I found an old book of Jules Renard, "Poil de
Carotte". It seemed old enough to me, but I couldn't find any
copyright notations. So, I mailed to Mr Hart all the information I
found on the title page and the verso, and asked him what he thought
about it. The next day I received his answer, he wrote: "We still have
to prove this edition was pre-1923, so I am forwarding to our
authority on such copyright research." This authority is Ms. Dianne
Bean who mailed me a few days later very pleasantly that I could start
typing, because the copyright issues had been resolved. She asked me
to send a "TP&V" (a photocopy of the title page and verso) of the book
to Mr. Hart, because they need that for legal reasons.
But something wasn't very clear to me concerning the format I had to
use. In the "FAQ" they spoke about "plain vanilla ASCII", something I
never had heard about in my life! In "How to Volunteer, PG Volunteers'
Board" Mr. Jim Tinsley answered all kind of questions about all kinds
of problems people have when they start volunteering. So I did the
same and sent him my question. I received an extensive answer about
all kind of formats in the "ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup" and he recommended
me to use "Codepage 1252" which is very common in Windows. Here are
the addresses which Jim sent to me:
"If you are interested in the differences, I recommend the excellent
web page
http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html
in the excellent reference site http://czyborra.com"
I chose a French book, first because I had it already on my bookshelf,
and secondly because I wanted to perfect my knowledge of the French
language and typing seemed the right way to do it. When copying an
author's text, you are very close to it. You also have to pay full
attention to the spelling of the words. Gradually you come under the
spell of the story and you forget that you are typing . . .
Nevertheless, it is hard work, especially when it is not your native
language, and therefore you shouldn't try to rush it. At first I
started with two or three pages a day, which means that you would need
about two months typing for an average book. But good typists can do
it more quickly.
I can only applaud the aim of PG, to put books available on the net as
much as possible and without cost, for every one in the whole world. I
love to co-operate with it.
In the meantime there are thousands and thousands of books in the
PG-collection, and that makes it a little difficult to find other
examples which are free of copyright, because they must be from before
1923. Since I've got the "PG-bug" it's a challenge for me to find
suitable copies, and I look for them high and low. I can buy a few
books for a song and I take them home as a trophy, looking forward to
the work which is waiting for me . . .
In libraries you can find old publications which you can find nowhere
else.
It's amazing how fascinating old books can be and how much you can
learn from them. For the moment I'm working on "Pecheur d'Islande" by
Pierre Loti, in which I get acquainted with an old tradition of
fishermen, very interesting. Without PG I would probably never have
read this. There must be still a lot of little treasures in some old
and dusty attics, waiting to be born again by the magic touch of a
PG-volunteer.
If you do it, no compensation or payment is waiting, but . . . doing
something disinterested and unselfish gives you a good feeling.
Bookmarks:
B.1. Project Gutenberg:
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GUTINDEX.ALL
(Complete list of posted eBooks)
B.2. Distributed Proofing Sites:
Charles Franks
JC Byers
Dewayne Cushman
B.3. Other On-Line eBook Pages:
The On-Line Books Page
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Internet Public Library
B.4. Lists of Suggested Books to Transcribe:
PG Books In Progress
On-Line Requested List
Steve Harris' "To-do"s
B.5. Finding Paper Books On-Line:
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to your HTML at the place where you want it displayed.
The "alt" text gives a label to the image, and is displayed if
the image can't be shown, or in the case of a browser for
visually impaired people.
You don't _have_ to add images with your HTML file, unless you
want to. In many older books, there are no images at all to
be added.
My final HTML text is now in htmstep7.htm. You need to have
the image front.gif in the same directory in order to see it.
When your HTML text is posted, the images will be zipped with
it, so that future readers can see them.
Step 8. Over to you!
This is enough to make a reasonable HTML format of most PG
texts, but it doesn't begin to cover everything that can be
done in HTML. If you've gone this far, I recommend the W3C's
tutorials: