My Contributions to Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders

in #books7 years ago

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About 10 years ago, I was very active in the Project Gutenberg community. I've long been a fan of both books and open culture, and I wanted to help spread some of the joy I felt from those areas of my life by contributing to the cause.

A lot of the work I did was through a volunteer project known as the Distributed Proofreaders. This is an independent organization created by a man named Charles Franks, whose primary goal was to distribute the effort required for scanning in books, processing page images using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, proofreading each page, and then assembling the proofread pages into a finished ebook suitable for Project Gutenberg.

I started with Distributed Proofreaders as a simple proofreader early in the project. After a few years, however, I became a regular contributor and project manager, helping to shepherd through literally hundreds of books – in addition to continuing my proofreading of random pages from various other books.

During the height of my involvement with the projects, I was buying as many old books as I could find simply to make sure they would be preserved for posterity. I purchased an old scanner that I spent hours (days even) scanning in pages, and would run them through Abbyy Finereader OCR software and a bunch of custom scripts created by myself and other members of the Distributed Proofreaders community.

Around the same time, a lot of university libraries were in the early stages of putting their public domain books online. I created a perl script called "snatch" that would download the page images for these books. A number of content providers and project managers for Distributed Proofreaders besides myself used the script. You can read the documentation and download it on my personal website (although it is long out of date and no longer actively maintained).

In fact, I haven't been active in either Project Gutenberg or Distributed Proofreaders in many years – though I still log in and proofread a page or two from time to time. But I got to thinking about all of this recently, and I decided that I should put together a list of books that I had some level of meaningful involvement in creating.

Books I Helped Contribute to Project Gutenberg

On my personal blog, I've created a table with a list of all the books I helped to contributed to Project Gutenberg. I normally don't like referencing things outside of Steemit, but the list was too big to post here.

Note that I'm only counting "major" contributions, not books where I merely proofread a few pages or so. This includes books which I did one or more of the following:

  • Scanned or downloaded page images and processed the text as a content provider for Distributed Proofreaders
  • Managed the book through the Distributed Proofreading process as a project manager
  • Post-processed books after it had been shepherded through the Distributed Proofreaders project management system
  • Produced the ebook independently for Project Gutenberg (outside of Distributed Proofreaders)

By my count, I played a major role in contributing 376 ebooks to Project Gutenberg. I'm proud of every one, and I hope to talk about many of them individually here on Steemit in future posts.


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nice...you deserve upvote and resteem...

u r welcome...buddy

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