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Home > Archive > General Discussion > December 2003 > Your Help is Needed for a Good Cause
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Your Help is Needed for a Good Cause
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| DaDnDe 2003-12-29, 5:24 pm |
| Hi all. I was wondering if maybe this should go into the "Book Review" forum. But I wanted it to be in a place where more people might see this.
There are literally millions of books out there that will slowly and eventually fade away because they aren't wildly popular. They are mostly old books that have been out of print for 50 years or more. These books will never be picked up by publishers for printing for financial reasons.
Project Gutenburg is a group of volunteers dedicated to bringing these works back to the masses via the internet.
Although many of these books are long forgotten (except by scholars and teachers, etc.) many of these books will provide someone a valuable experience in the future. But Project Gutenburg needs your help to make that happen.
Each book that is added to the COMPLETELY FREE library must be physically scanned then proof-read before it can be published on-line. To accomplish this, a system has been impelmented where each page of a book is proof-read 3 times on its way to becoming a "gold edition" on-line book.
This requires a huge amount of real man-hours to accomplish. That is where you all come in.
We need volunteers to sign up to proof read. It doesn't require downloading anything. All you need is an internet connection.
You can do this whenever you have 2 minutes of spare time. The project is divided up by each page scan. On average, each page takes about 2-5 minutes to proof. (realize that you will be comparing an OCR output to the actual image of the scanned page)
This is something that anyone can do. It is not technically challenging. There are no expectations put on you as far as volume of work. And you need not feel pressured to be accurate(obviously the more accurate you are, the more welcome you are. Besides too many inaccuracies and you will be removed from the Christmas card list) because others will check your work and provide feedback if they see a weak area.
For more information go to http://promo.net/pg/
or visit the Guttenburg web site at
http://guttenburg.net
at either place click on the "distributed proofreading" link to sign up for this worthy cause. | |
| gr33nd4yg1rl 2003-12-30, 2:12 pm |
| sounds neat. i just registered  | |
| DaDnDe 2003-12-30, 4:02 pm |
| hey great!
you will find that it can be an interesting project.
after you proof 50 pages, then you will be able to browse the 2nd round books. these are ones that have been proofed once.
i recently proofed a half dozen pages of the Warren Commission Report (the kennedy assassignation)
was a very interesting read. its too bad that you cant pick what pages to proof. but i guess the way they are doing it is the best.
you will also notice that currently we are behind in our monthly goal. i guess christmas does cut into your spare time a bit...
the best thing about this project is, is that you can pick it up anytime you want for as little as 5-10 minutes and...
still be productive
do as little as one page
make a contribution
or like me sometimes spend a couple hours just because the book has taken me prisioner. |
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