Please send your feedback directly to Michael S. Hart

This is the first note to the new Project Gutenberg Volunteer's List.

First let give you a whole new year's worth of thanks for your help!!

Then let me tell you how simple Project Gutenberg really is.

We post our files in such a manner that they are available all over a whole world of sites [not that we don't need more] the next day.  The process is called "Unlimited Distribution" through which we encourage anyone who wants to to repost out books anywhere and any way they are willing to do so, though we do ask a royalty for commercial usage.

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually made available in "Plain Vanilla ASCII". . .a term we created to define these simplistic standards:

Please keep the following somewhere you can refer to it now and then.

This is the REALLY SIMPLE standards file for Project Gutenberg Etexts

1.  Put a blank line between each and every paragraph.  For Mac users this means each line IS its own paragraph.  For DOS and UNIX users it means hard returns ending each line--cr/lf--13 0D ^M CR / 10 0A ^J LF
2.  The only markup we use is when emphasis italics or bold are used. Then we use CAPS for those words.  If only one letter, _I_, _O_, etc.
3.  Margins should be somewhere between 55 and 79 letters per line & watch out for trailing spaces, which tend to creep in now and then.
4.  Use only the same characters you would use in writing email in a plain manner. . .higher order characters, accented characters, oe,ae and all those should be written in the plainest possible manner so a wider audience can be reached.  We can also post other files, having all the higher level characters for other languages and characters--
but, we would like to at least post Plain Vanilla ASCII files, too.

The only other aspect of Project Gutenberg Etexts is the header with the legal provisions required to protect our volunteers and users of our Etexts from intellectual property hassles and the like.

We would like it if you would put the header at the top of the Etext files you send in, but if this is a big hassle, we can do it.  These legalisms have withstood the test of time and were written by a very competent team of volunteer lawyers expressly for Project Gutenberg.

Some people are having trouble saving these as separate files, so it will probably be best if I send the header separately, next message, which you can hopefully save as a file, and import into the Etexts-- don't worry if this is too hard to do, I can do that work in 10 - 15 minutes, but I am becoming aware that I have fewer and fewer periods of 10 - 15 minutes.  Even if you can't get the headers on the files, it would still help immensely if you could email me back the headers with the appropriate data already filled in and I could attach them, put in the Etext number, etc.

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A little about Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg is the oldest information provider on the Internet . . .we started in 1971 by posting the Declaration of Independence a short time after the University of Illinois got on the Internet with 19 other sites, as the Net finally ceased being an experimental site cluster near the west coast of the United States.

We have always been volunteers, including myself, though I realize a few things will have to change if Project Gutenberg is going to head on into the future without me someday.

We have sometimes been an officially sanctioned part of a university and sometimes not officially connected with anything.  Our thanks to Carnegie Mellon University for currently supporting us, and Illinois Benedictine College, now Benedictine University, for getting us to a recognizable position on and off the Internet.  While we never had a position of official sanction at the University of Illinois, we were undoubtedly the first "Internet Hitchhikers" when we got our account at the U of I Materials Research Lab, back in 1971, and $100 million in computer time, to get us started.

For most of our 27 years we have not been officially affiliated with any institution, though this is been true for only one year of these last 10 years.  Now that we have posted over 1,000 Etexts, and, have the support of Carnegie Mellon University, we are more well received
than when the common report was:  "We don't really have to take that Project Gutenberg thing seriously, they won't be around next year."

However, in the midst of our gained security and respect last year a doubling of our Etext production last year was forgone due to effort aimed at just keeping Project Gutenberg going.

Here is the rate at which we have produced Etexts over the years:

32 per month in 1997 for a yearly total of 384 and a total of 1152
32 per month in 1996 for a yearly total of 385 and a total of  768
16 per month in 1995 for a yearly total of 192 and a total of  383

[See 1990 index notes for a description of doing the Bible
and Shakespeare, and the combining of shorter files from a
previous numbering system into the 10 files before 1990.]

You should be made aware that computers and networks were pretty small and slow before the 90's, and that we were not encouraged, even actively discouraged, from placing large files for download . . .quite the opposite as today.  Therefore, the first ones are very small, and we had to originally work on Shakespeare and the Bible as individual files for each play, poem, or book, so these files would not overload the systems we were working on then.

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That more or less brings you up to date and gives you a history, somewhat abbreviated, of Project Gutenberg.  You will find other materials about Project Gutenberg on our web site:  http://promo.net/pg/

If you need more supervision than I can provide, please contact, <beandp@primenet.com Dianne Bean or David Price ccx074@ccj.coventry.ac.uk, who are our two Directors of Production.  If any of you are willing to help them supervise some of our volunteers or teams of volunteers on certain projects, that would be *GREATLY*
appreciated by Dianne, David, and myself. 

Please don't hesitate to ask for more information about all this.

Thanks!

Michael Stern Hart