Please send your feedback directly to Michael S. Hart

Contents
Request for Support and Introduction
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 Each Subject

Request for Support and Introduction

This is a blatant request for support for Project Gutenberg.

If you do not wish to support free Project Gutenberg Etexts, please just delete this now, and accept our apologies for an email that you didn't want. Project Gutenberg messages have traditionally been relayed by a number of listservers so you might get more than one copy, again our apologies.

We usually limit ourselves to sending out such requests just once in April and once in October of each year.

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This is sent in honor of World Book Day and National Library Library Week in the U.S., and various other means to promote books, reading, and literacy, please take part in any way in these efforts.

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.

The 1350th Project Gutenberg Etext should be posted by now!!

That puts us 1/3 of the from #1,000 to #2,000: or for those who have been here for a longer time, 2/3 from #1 to #2000!!

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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.

More on the United States Copyright Term Extension Act of 1997 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

See also More Detailed Informations in the section below.

3. 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.

More on this in the More Details section below.

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.

More Details

5. Donations

Project Gutenberg is almost completely dependent on your donations.

We need your donations desperately.
Please send what you can!

Most of our donations are simply mailed to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box 2782
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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 1,000th 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 scheduled 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.

More Details

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. . . .

More Details

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

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.

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More Detailed Information

1. Copyright

Copyright Extension Is Also Happening in the United States

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 #1,000, 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.

Of particular interest at this time is:

"The Oxford Book of English Verse"

which used to be available Project Bartleby at Columbia University.

We have the full co-operation and resources of the Internet Archive at our disposal for this reclamation project and have succeeded.

You will see "The Oxford Book of English Verse" in the list below:

New Etexts Needing Proofreading

This is an advance listing of books still needing proofreading, and are still a month or two away from their official release dates.

Again my thanks to you all!

Michael Stern Hart Executive Director Project Gutenberg