PG Other Newsletter: Project Gutenberg Needs You (2000-03-07)

by Michael Cook on March 7, 2000
Newsletters

From - Tue Mar 07 16:14:39 2000
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2000 05:54:06 -0600 (CST)
From: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@prairienet.org>
To: "Project Gutenberg mailing list" <gutnberg@listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: Project Gutenberg Needs YOU!!!!!!!
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[Sorry about the header on the last message. . .mh]


!!!Project Gutenberg Request for Support for March 8, 2000!!

Birthday of the Michael  Hart, Founder of Project Gutenberg!


[This is a blatant request for support for Project Gutenberg
Please delete it and accept our apology if not interested!!]

[We only send such messages once each Spring and/or Autumn.]

Lot's of important news for those who read all the way thru.

[Now that we can officially say we have "thousands" of these
Etexts online, we should prepare to create an institution of
support for Project Gutenberg that will hopefully carry this
project into, and at least part of the way through, the next
millennium. . .your help could be invaluable. . .more below]

We Have Made It Much Easier To Volunteer, see promo.net/pg!!

[There is a brand new set of web pages for our volunteers so
please help us with any suggestions and/or corrections, your
help in making this page serve our volunteers is appreciated
more than you might imagine. . .this page could become a big
foundation for our future volunteers, we are ALL volunteers]

***

Have We Given Away A Trillion Dollars Worth Of Etext Yet??!!

Yes, if we manage to get the average one of our 2,500 Etexts
to 1.67% of the world's population, using a nominal value of
$5 as the "street value" of the average one of our books, as
our population has passed 6 billion around the official date
of release of our Etext #2000.  In fact, we are ~all the way
from using the $5 nominal value to the $4 value that will be
the result of our posting Etext #2500. . .but then it may be
a while to get to the $3 mark at Etext #3333, as it takes an
ever increasing number to bring the cost down another dollar
. . .this time it will take 833 more Etexts. . .last time it
only took 500 more. . .next time it will take 1666 to get it
from $3 to $2. . .and then 5000 more to get nominal price of
a book down to $1 and still give away $1 trillion in Etexts.

***

The major purpose of Project Gutenberg is to encourage great
and small efforts towards the creation and distribution of a
library of Etexts for unlimited distribution worldwide.  Our
goal is to encourage the creation and distribution of 10,000
Etexts by the end of 2001. . .

This is a goal we may have already accomplished, though many
of the 10,000 files are still very much Limited Distribution
items, and we are working to get them posted in more places,
on more sites, for greater and greater public access.  These
will hopefully all be posted on Project Gutenberg sites some
time in the not too distant future, we are dicsussing this a
lot with the other Etext makers.  Creating a liaison between
all the Etexts makers is one of our major goals right now.

The 2350th Project Gutenberg Etext should be posted shortly!
And we should have created 1/3 of the 10,000 we hope to have
posted by the end of 2001, and hopefully encouraged donation
of the other 2/3 by the other Etext non-commerical efforts.

***

Before we even get to the Table of Contents, here are a few requests
for help directly from our volunteers:

We need help getting a new translation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas
out of WordPerfect 6.1 and into plain text, with some indication of the
breaks between paragraphs.  Please email hart@pobox.com.  Thanks!  mh

***

For any persons interested in working on the works of Sir Richard F.
Burton, we're trying to put together a Burton Team.  The first objective
is to prepare the Arabian Nights for publication.  Other works will be
forthcoming.  If you are interested in participating on the team, please
contact me at jcbyers@netscape.com.  The complete Table of Contents of
the Arabian Nights is available at
www.capitalnet.com/~jcbyers/default.htm.  Feel free to peruse the site
and choose a 'Tale' to work on.  jcbyers <jcbyers@netscape.net>

***

If we are going to continue on past our first goal of 10,000 Etexts,
we are going to need some Big Time public relations help, and some
Big Time fundraising. . .here's why. . . .

1.  Getting the Etexts to twice as many people is just as important
as creating twice as many Etexts. . .but without MAJOR publicity it
is not likely to happen. . .we constantly get messages from readers
who tell us they have been LOOKING for Etexts for years and just at
that present time FINALLY FOUND US. . . .  That means we cannot get
to a major part of our audience with the kind of publicity we have,
we need something more. . . .  For example, we were the first in an
entirely new column:  "People To Watch" in the November 8th edition
of TIME magazine, but we have received less than a dozen emails per
that article. . .what we really need to do is get on Oprah Winfrey,
and hopefully add something to her book club.  Those of you on AOL,
perhaps you could email the show and request they invite us. . . !

We should undoubtedly also try the other talk shows, and "magazine"
shows, etc.  All the press we receive is from them contacting us, I
have had no luck "generating" publicity. . .which seems to be easy,
for those who have the knack. . .it's just not MY knack. . .help!!!

2.  Running group of 1,000 volunteers to generate 10,000 Etexts has
been something that IS a knack I have. . .and it hasn't cost a very
large amount of money to do it. . .otherwise you wouldn't know that
we exist. . .but running a group of 10,000 volunteers to create the
1,000,000 Etext that are possible in the NEXT 10 years, is NOT easy
. . .even for someone such as myself. . .it will require more phone
lines and calls than I can afford. . .and more email than I can do,
on my own, so we either need volunteers to help coordinate, or, the
possibility looms that we should actually HIRE people. . . .

When I first started Project Gutenberg in 1971, I was sure I should
be able to find someone else to replace me, as it did not cost real
money or take real time to run. . .but for the last 10 years it has
taken just about all the time I have, including what I would need a
lot more of to have a personal life. . .and I would LIKE to have an
expectation that Project Gutenberg would survive at least 10 years,
after I am gone, and hopefully 100, and if I really dream, 1,000!!!

So. . .if you are willing and able to help us with these or in some
related manner, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. . . .


***


Contents


Overview

0.
Etexts in Various Languages

1.
Copyright

2.
Scanning and Typing

3.
Proofreading

4.
FTP and WWW Sites

5.
Donations

6.
Raiders of the Lost Archives

7.
Special Requests

8.
Programming

9.
New Etexts Needing Proofreading



Followed By More Detailed Information On Most Of These Subjects


*******

0.
Etexts in Various Languages

As you may be aware, this last year we have greatly expanded our
output of Etexts in languages other than English, including:

1.  French
2.  German
3.  Spanish
4.  Italian
5.  Danish
6.  Swedish
7.  Chinese
8.  Japanese
9.  Latin

and more. . .and we would like to continue doing more Etexts in
these language and even more languages.  So. . .if you have the
skills to work in languages other than English, or to manage an
Etext Team in any language, English included please let me know!!!


Here is a request from our Spanish Team Leader:


From:  Jesus Joglar" <joglar@iiqab.csic.es> our Spanish Team Leader

[He is very busy, so we could use more Spanish Team Leaders if any
of you are willing. . . .]


Besides I think that we did not get as much enthusiasm as expected from the
potential volunteers, but anyway I will keep going at my own pace. In this
context I would like to tell you that I have a file of a book written by
Francisco de Quevedo called "El buscsn" (a classic from the spanish golden
age) ready to get proofed. Is it possible to ask for help with this one?

I also have the book (46 files for the moment) of poems by a cuban writer
(Josi Martm: Versos Sencillos [Maybe you know it because it was sung by
people like Pete Seeger or Joan Baez]) and another spanish classic (Amadms
de Gaula written by Garci Rodrmguez de Montalvo. This is in 138 files and
it is a kind of Don Quijote with regard to the date and type).

I will go working on these and letting you know about my progress. As soon
as I have a little bit more of time I will contact some of the "old"
volunteers to try to forward a little the spanish etexts group unless
someone else would do it.


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 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.

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 have a scanner, or have access to one, or plan to get one in
the future, please contact our Director of Production, Dianne Bean,
beandp@primenet.com, with a cc: to me at hart@pobox.com


2.
Proofreading

Often the only way for many of our volunteers to work on Etexts for
us is if they can ship their book to one of you, have it scanned in
and then returned to them for proofreading.

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 Etext for sites
in Africa and South America, and other locales.  If you know anyone
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.


5.
Donations

Project Gutenberg is almost completely dependent on your donations.


Most of our donations are simply mailed to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825-2782

and are made out to "Project Gutenberg/CMU"

Carnegie Mellon University has also graciously provided those means
necessary for credit card and other means of donation.  Just let us
know, and we will put you in touch with the right people there.

The Holiday Season of 1996 was the first time we ever raised enough
in a month to support Project Gutenberg for that month, but we have
received only a few donations since that time.  I would like to see
Project Gutenberg become more or less an independent grassroot type
of organization, but I am not really much of a fund-raiser type, as
the fund-raiser at Carnegie Mellon University can tell you.

Anything you can do in this are would be greatly appreciated, even,
since we are at this juncture, helping us get more Public Relations
coverage of our 2,000th Etext.  This should not be too difficult in
one respect, as many of the sites on the World Wide Web have never,
not once, been updated, since 1995.

Project Gutenberg sites up updated more than once a day on average,
since we are presenting 432 Etexts per year, and plan to move to at
least 500 year after #2000, which is schedule for January 1, 2000.

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 200 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
entirely too limiting niche in the computer oriented media, and get
some more general publicity out there to the millions of people who
aren't computer oriented at all, but will would like to receive the
Etexts for education or entertainment.  This is a majority of world
population centers, and we should do more to reach them.

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 Etext 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 Etexts 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 Etexts, even though 99% are a
dead issue, out of print for decades. . . .

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 etext 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
a couple of weeks, and is a good short-term project for folks who want to
get their feet wet with Project Gutenberg.  Dianne Bean <beandp@primenet.com>

8.
Programming

Due to the various formats in which we receive many of our Etexts,
we need some assistance in writing PERL scripts, vi scripts, or an
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 Etext 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

[This has happened since our last message of this kind] and will be
happening in most other countries unless action is taken.  Lawsuits
are being made to reverse this trend, but not much chance without a
lot of public relations efforts]

Rumor has it that the United States is pushing through HR604 & S505
[House Resolution #604 and Senate Bill #505] which comprise what is
called "The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998" which will remove
20 years of what would be Public Domain information from our future
libraries.  We strongly suggest you call AND write your congressmen
to avoid removing a million books from what is already becoming the
"Information Rich Versus Information Poor" in a nations in which an
illiteracy rate is virtually equal to the literacy rate, in adults,
aged 16 and over, as per the 1994 US Literacy Report.

You can subscribe to a listserver on copyright extension at:
extension-l@olemiss.edu

or go to web sites on the subject at:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/
http://davinci.marc.gatech.edu/~tad/dennis/no-cense.htm



2.
Scanning and Typing

We don't really want to get into a public recommendation about what
scanners and OCR [Optical Character Recognition] programs word best
. . .it is really the case that some do better on some books, while
other do better on others.

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 Etext 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 Etext
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 Etexts are accurate
to an amazing degree, even more amazing when you compare then to an
entire world of Etexts prepared by both the scholarly or commercial
Etext 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 Etext with the same amount of effort.

Nevertheless, even the most famous universities of the world have a
collection of Etexts, many of which have vastly more errors that in
our collection.  This is also true of the commercial Etexts.  Don't
be afraid that your efforts won't be as good as all the others, the
process of improving Project Gutenberg Etexts is never ending.

In addition, there are many volunteers who would prefer to have an
Etext 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.

I have promised to do several things once we reached Etext #2,000,
one of which is to provide more guidance to those who seek it, and
that guidance will be coming from Dianne Bean, true librarian, who
is also working on the cataloguing project I also promised will be
forthcoming once we reach Etext #2,000.


More on:
Proofreading:  We could also use people who know how to use DIFF or
similar programs 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 Etexts, 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 Etexts should not suffer any.


5.
Donations

We have never received any local, regional or national grants; your
donations, and the support of Carnegie Mellon University and people
I would hope to count as my friends are the backbone of our support
and we could hardly survive otherwise.


6.
Raiders of the Lost Archives

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.

*

And now here are the listings of our most recent Etexts, an extra month, just
for those of you who have read this far. . .we hope you enjoy them. . . .

Actually, I ended up putting them in a separate message this year. . . .
Please see extra Newsletter accompanying this.

*

Hopefully it has been worth your while to read this far. . .and you will take
a moment to consider making a tax-deductible donation to Project Gutenberg as
we are, as once before, without any financial income, including myself. . .mh


Project Gutenberg donations are tax deductible to the full extents
of the law, and are handled by Carnegie Mellon University.  If you
need a letter verifying your contribution, please mention that.


Checks should be made out to "Project Gutenberg/CMU" and mailed to:

Project Gutenberg
P.O. Box 2782
Champaign, IL
61825-2782

If you would like to volunteer, please contact one of our Directors:


Greg Newby <gbnewby@ils.unc.edu>,  United States
Dianne Bean <beandp@primenet.com>  United States
Please not much March email for Dianne
John Bickers <jbickers@ihug.co.nz> New Zealand
Sue Asscher <asschers@dingoblue.net.au> Australia
David Price <ccx074@coventry.ac.uk> England

We also have have a Director for those interested
in German Etexts, and a current special project of
translating the 1922 German edition of Siddhartha.
Please contact:
Mike Pullen <globaltraveler5565@yahoo.com>

We are VERY interested in adding other languages,
making more translations, etc.  Let me know if you
are interested!!!

Thank you so much!!!!!!!


Michael

=============================================

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Benedictine University, Lisle, IL  60532-0900
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
Permanent Internet Address!!!  hart@pobox.com

Internet User Number 100 [approximately] [TM]
One of the several "Ask Dr Internet" Sponsors

Break Down the Bars of Ignorance & Illiteracy
On the Carnegie Libraries' 100th Anniversary!

If I don't answer in two days, please resend.
It usually means I did not get/see your note.

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