[Sc] [Fwd: [school-discuss] Fwd: [posted] Draft Request For New Volunteers]
Richard Smedley
sc at mailman.lug.org.uk
Tue Sep 17 14:59:01 2002
[snip]
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> #### Date Title
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>
> Contents
>
> Overview
>
> 0.
> eBooks in Various Languages
>
> 1.
> Copyright
>
> 2.
> Scanning and Typing
>
> 3.
> Proofreading
>
> 4.
> FTP and WWW Sites
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> 5.
> Donations
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> Raiders of the Lost Archives
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> Special Requests
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> 8.
> Programming
>
> 9.
> New eBooks Needing Proofreading
>
> Followed By More Detailed Information On Most Of These Subjects
>
> *******
>
> 0.
> eBooks in Various Languages
>
> As you may be aware, this last year we have greatly expanded our
> output of eBooks in languages other than English, including:
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> 11. DNA/ATGC
> 12. Welsh
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> 17. Greek
> 18. Hebrew
> 19. Old French*
> 20. Polish*
> 21 Russian*
> 22. Romanian*
> [Those with an * are still in need of work]
>
> eBook Languages
> alphabetically:
>
> 1. Bulgarian
> 2. Chinese
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> 4. DNA/ATGC
> 5. Dutch
> 6. English
> 7. Flemish
> 8. French
> 9. German
> 10. Greek
> 11. Hebrew
> 12. Italian
> 13. Japanese
> 14. Latin
> 15. Portugese
> 16. Spanish
> 17. Swedish
> 18. Welsh
>
> ***
>
> 1.
> Copyright
>
> Project Gutenberg will do copyright research for you if you send us
> xeroxes of the title page [both sides, even if one side is blank.]
> [We will do this even for people working on other eBook projects.]
>
> We need people to hunt through libraries or bookstores for editions
> that we can use to legally prepare our Electronic Texts [Etexts.]
>
> Germany, Italy and Great Britain have each extended their copyright
> to "life + 70 years," as opposed to the "life +50 years" of "Berne"
> copyright conventions. Residents of those areas will have to be an
> extra bit careful, as a million items that used to be Public Domain
> in those countries reverted to copyright status, even though a vast
> majority of them are no longer for sale. This is now true for some
> other countries, including France and perhaps Brazil and Portugal.
>
> These are the latest lists I have received: [NOT authoritative]
> Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Bulgaria,
> Burkina Faso, Burundi, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, El Salvador,
> Iceland, Japan, (South) Korea, Latvia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand,
> Panama, the Philippines, Poland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
> Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad
> and Tobago, and Ukraine are all "life plus 50 years" countries,
> or were last I checked.) and Portugal. I have been told Turkey
> should be included, can anyone verify that?
>
> Life + 75: In Guatemala and Mexico, copyrights tend to last for the
> lifetime of the author plus 75 years, with certain exceptions.
>
> Life + 70: Poland and much of EU, and Brazil
>
> More on the United States Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 in a
> "More Detailed Information" section below.
>
> 2.
> Scanning and Typing
>
> Once we have located some proper edition[s], then our volunteers do
> the books by scanning or typing them into the computer. Usually it
> is the same person who does the proofreading, but not necessarily.
>
> If you would like to help us make eBooks available in the future,
> please contact the following:
> Greg Newby <gbnewby@ils.unc.edu>
> Brett Fishburne <william.fishburne@verizon.net>
> Jim Tinsley <jtinsley@pobox.com>
> with a cc: to me at hart@pobox.com
>
> 3.
> Proofreading
>
> We have a variety of ways for you to help with Project Gutenberg.
>
> Often the only way for many of our volunteers to work on eBooks for
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>
> If you could do the scanning for them, it would help us immensely.
>
> 4.
> FTP and WWW Sites
>
> We would very much like to provide better access to eBook for sites
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> who might be able to help with this, please read this:
>
> We are always in search of more FTP and World Wide Web sites, so an
> increasing number of people can download our books without unusual,
> even often fatal, delays and glitches in transmission.
>
> If you, or someone you know, can spare a gigabyte on their servers,
> please have them contact us about creating more mirror sites. This
> is a particular need for countries south of the equator, where text
> files are only available on one server that we know of. If you can
> help us get our books into South America, Africa, and further, this
> would be a great help. We have something restarted in New Zealand,
> with extensions into Australia, but the load this server can handle
> is probably going to be easily exhausted.
>
> Some local research is required to find out what copyright laws and
> other regulations must be satisfied to operate such servers.
>
> 5.
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> As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
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> Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
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> Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
> Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
> Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
> Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
> Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
>
> Unapproved Status
> -------------- --------
> Arizona Sent
> California Sent
> [These two should be ok by now]
>
> Colorado Starting over
> Maryland Starting over
> Minnesota Starting over
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> Wyoming Starting over
>
> Anything you can do in these states would be greatly appreciated,
> since we are at this juncture, helping us get more Public Relations
> coverage of our just released 5,000th eBook.
>
> As I said, anything would be greatly appreciated. This SHOULD BE a
> great time to get some PR. . .but it still appears, even though the
> project has been written up probably about 300 times, that they are
> going to write us up when THEY have a reason to rather than when WE
> have a reason, and we feel it is now time to try to break out of an
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>
> If you have any "ins" in the press or with the corporate world, this
> would be a good time to use them.
>
> 6.
> Raiders of the Lost Archives
>
> As you may be aware from several events of a month ago, and earlier,
> there is a downside to having eBook archives in limited distribution
> modalities, simply because if one site, or one person, or even whole
> countries, change their minds about what they are going to archive--
> then the whole world loses access to those files.
>
> A good example was the loss of The Oxford Book of English Verse from
> Project Bartleby. We have taken great pains to get this book, which
> is undoubtedly important, back on the Net. If you want to see which
> sites have lost this file, just do a Yahoo search for the book, then
> count the vast number of sites that have blank entries for the book,
> once it was deleted from a multiplicity of links; this is an example
> of how important it is for eBooks to be posted on many sites, rather
> than just one site will many links to it!!!
>
> We need volunteers who will search the world for every possible book
> and help us preserve it.
>
> Project Gutenberg will not release any of this material until we can
> do the copyright research and prove it belongs in the Public Domain.
>
> We realize that many of our volunteers sometimes get frustrated that
> we do this research, which possibly takes half our time, but it will
> become more and more apparent why this is a good policy as copyright
> laws become stiffer and stiffer, and world intellectual property can
> be limited in greater and great ways. It is quite likely that it is
> going to be some time in the next calendar year that a United States
> law killing off another 20 years of public domain in the US will get
> passed, to join the countries listed above, in eliminating a million
> books from potentially being posted as eBooks, even though 99% are a
> dead issue, out of print for decades. . . .
>
> [It did pass. October 27, 1998 - the U.S. went from life plus 50 to
> life plus 70 for works created after 1/1/78, and from 75 to 95 years
> for many works published before 1978. . .but this doesn't change the
> items that had already entered the public domain in the US, unlike a
> reversion from public domain status to copyright status in countries
> in the European Union and other locales. Thus, the US copyright for
> most works still cuts in at 1923. . .and this is scheduled to stay a
> cutoff date until around 2020.]
>
> So the rule of thumb we use most is that anything pre-1923 is ok.
>
> 7.
> Special Requests
>
> We occasionally receive scanned material which could have benefitted from
> more cleanup before it was sent to us. What we need is proofers with
> patience to read through an eBook and take out stray letters, clean up the
> punctuation, and send a list of questionable lines to the person who
> scanned it so they can send corrections to be inserted. This usually takes
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> get their feet wet with Project Gutenberg.
>
> 8.
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>
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> assortment of other scripts that will assist our proofreaders, and
> our editors, in dealing with page numbers, markups, italics and an
> assortment of other formatting issue that come up time to time.
>
> Most of these are fairly trivial and can be solved with a one line
> script for each of the particular situations and we just need some
> people to either run the scripts we already have, or to write some
> new ones from time to time when a particularly rough eBook version
> arrives at our doorstep. These scripts, which take minutes to set
> up, and seconds to run, can save HOURS of proofreaders' time. You
> can be a BIG help just running some of these scripts for us, or in
> writing or rewriting some of them on occasion.
>
> ***
>
> More Detailed Information
>
> 1.
> Copyright
>
> Copyright Extension Is Also Happening in the United States
>
> Since Project Gutenberg began in 1971, millions of copyrights in
> the US should have expired, but are being prevented from expiring
> by various political action groups.
>
> 2.
> Scanning and Typing
>
> We don't really want to get into a public recommendation about what
> scanners and OCR [Optical Character Recognition] programs work best
> . . .it is really the case that some do better on some books, while
> others do better on other fonts, page coloration, etc.
>
> However, we ARE willing to share our experience if you ask.
>
> 3.
> Proofreading
>
> Our official accuracy level that we try to maintain has been 99.9%,
> for our first release, which is usually raised to 99.95% before the
> vast majority of people ever see them, and this standard has been a
> standard that has been adopted by most eBook providers, including a
> new effort toward Etext by the Library of Congress and the national
> libraries of Great Britain and other countries.
>
> What we hope you realize is that any serious effort to get an eBook
> to 100% accuracy should take MORE effort than to create an entirely
> new Etext with an accuracy level of 99.9% to 99.95%.
>
> While many, even most, of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are accurate
> to an amazing degree, even more amazing when you compare then to an
> entire world of eBooks prepared by both the scholarly or commercial
> eBook enterprises, we do not feel that the additional doubling of a
> more than massive effort, to possibly reduce the errors, by another
> .02% perhaps, would have anywhere near the value of the preparation
> of an entirely new eBook with the same amount of effort.
>
> Nevertheless, even the most famous universities of the world have a
> collection of eBooks, many of which have vastly more errors than in
> our collection. This is also true of the commercial eBooks. Don't
> be afraid that your efforts won't be as good as all the others, the
> process of improving Project Gutenberg eBooks is never ending.
>
> In addition, there are many volunteers who would prefer to have an
> eBook or at least an author selected for them to work on. As some
> of you already know, _I_ have been reluctant to choose for anyone,
> not wanting to bias the formation of our collection with my choice
> of what are the great books of human history.
>
> More on:
>
> Proofreading: We could also use people who know how to use DIFF or
> Word's "compare" that point out differences between two files, even
> programmers that might only be able to search our files for matched
> and unmatched quotes. [Remember that when quoting many paragraphs,
> each internal paragraph gets only an opening quote.]
>
> Our proofreading is a never-ending story. . .we run spell-checkers,
> and other varieties of programs, on our eBooks, and have real human
> proofreaders go over them in pretty incredible detail, but we would
> be remiss if we did not tell you that over 99% of the books we work
> from have their own errors, and that while we catch some of those--
> we undoubtedly introduce errors of our own, and even though we will
> gladly keep updating our editions, ad infinitum, the odds that this
> will catch ALL the errors in the near future are virtually 0%.
>
> Therefore. . .we need you to email us when you have suggestion, and
> comments, and when you find possible errors that need correction.
>
> 4.
> FTP and WWW Sites
>
> We are willing to adjust the bandwidth on various sites by adjusting
> the publicity various sites receive, and also by asking our users to
> only use certain sites at certain times of the day or night. So the
> drain on sites volunteering to mirror eBooks should not suffer any.
>
> Remember:
> Some local research is required to find out what copyright laws and
> other regulations must be satisfied to operate such servers.
>
> 5.
> Donations
>
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>
> You are the backbone of our support.
>
> We could barely survive otherwise.
>
> 6.
> Raiders of the Lost Archives [This needs a rewrite]
>
> This is going to be particularly evident if the raggedy performances
> that are destroying 99% of the Public Domain continue by raiding the
> Public Domain, taking a million works out of the Public Domain, over
> a period of 20 years, and putting perhaps 1% of 1% of them back in a
> print version so that those who owned the copyrights for the past 75
> years and made millions from them, can make another million per year
> while 99.99% of those works disappear from public access altogether.
>
> *
>
> Hopefully it has been worth your while to read this far. . .and you will take
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> or
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> Well, that's all. . .except to include the address:
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>
> As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
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> Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
> Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
> Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
> Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
> Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
> Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
> Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
>
> Unapproved Status
> -------------- --------
> Arizona Sent
> California Sent
> [These two should be OK now]
>
> Colorado Starting over
> Maryland Starting over
> Minnesota Starting over
> North Dakota Starting over
> Wyoming Starting over
>
> [Resident of these five state CAN make donations,
> it's just that we cannot solicit from them yet.]
>
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>
> Michael S. Hart
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> Project Gutenberg
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