What do you do while you're listening to a conference call, or waiting for an application to compile, or waiting for a document to print? Twiddle your thumbs? Surf the web for the latest depressing financial news and gossip on celebrities? Why not use that wasted time to contribute to the world's first online library of free electronic texts, Project Gutenberg?
Project Gutenberg was begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, with the goal of creating a library of 10,000 electronic books which would be free and downloadable to anyone with a computer. The library contains books that have entered the public domain after their copyrights expired (these books were typically published before 1925). Until a few years ago, each electronic book was created by one person, who laboriously scanned a paper copy of the book, one page at a time, on an electronic scanner, then converted each scanned image into ASCII text, then assembled all the pieces of text into one file and proofread and formatted the file. I have contributed five books to Project Gutenberg using this technique.
In 2000, Charles Franks created the Distributed Proofreaders project to help speed up the process of creating electronic books. In this project, volunteer project managers scan paper books to create a set of images for each book, and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert each image to a page of ASCII text. Then a project manager uploads the images and text pages to the Disibuted Proofreaders server. Next, volunteer proofreaders view a list of projects at the website and choose one to proofread. Then a simple proofreading interface is displayed and a volunteer can proofread pages of the project, comparing the OCRed text to the image of the page, and making any corrections necessary to the text. After a book is completed, a post-processor assembles all of the text pages into the final e-text and submits it to Project Gutenberg, where it is sent to ftp archives all over the world. This project has made it possible to create an electronic book in hours instead of weeks.
With the help of hundreds of volunteers, the project now proofreads over 6,000 pages (twenty-four 250-page books) every day. On September 3, 2003, the project completed its 2,000th book: soon after, on October 15, 2003, it helped Project Gutenberg reach its first goal of publishing its 10,000th book. As of today Distributed Proofreaders has completed 4,841 books.
So how can you help? Sign up, choose a book that interests you, and proofread just one page a day. Depending on the difficulty of the book, this can take 5 to 30 minutes. You can proofread a sentence while you're waiting for another web page to load, a paragraph while you're waiting for your document to print, or a page while you're waiting for someone else to finish talking on a conference call. If 100 people proofread just one page a day, they will create a new electronic book in just two to three days. You don't need any special tools or skills to proofread. The project site contains detailed proofreading guildelines and tutorials, proofreading mentors, and very active discussion groups.
If you're fluent in another language besides English, you can also help proofread books in other languages in the Distributed Proofreaders Europe project. This project enables volunteers to proofread books in any Unicode-supported script.
(2004-07-23 10:47:33.0) Permalink