This is the Project Gutenberg Newsletter for April-June 2025
CONTENTS
* Empathy.ai seeks testers of Project Gutenberg-focused AI
* Library records (MARC) are now available again
* Join Distributed Proofreaders
* Find Project Gutenberg on social media
* New eBook Listings from March-May 2025
* Empathy.ai seeks testers of Project Gutenberg-focused AI
Project Gutenberg has had interests in how modern artificial intelligence tools might be helpful for different situations. Within the past year, Project Gutenberg has added AI-generated book summaries and browsing categories for almost every book - you can see these on any book's landing page.
Recently, we have been collaborating with Empathy.ai. They have some AI models that are intended to help people with finding books, asking questions about books, and searching the Project Gutenberg catalog.
The model is available here:
http://projectgutenberg.generativeai.empathy.ai
They would appreciate any feedback, especially failures or surprises. It's common for AI models to "hallucinate" incorrect details, and it's also common for models to not find the right answer to a question. If you can identify these or other failures, it can help to improve the model.
For the curious, here are technical details of the models:
https://huggingface.co/empathyai
Contact Empathy.ai via their website to share any feedback:
https://empathy.ai/
* Library records (MARC) are now available again
MARC is the lingua franca of library catalogs. It is a way of representing data about items like books. The data about items is known as metadata. Thanks to a partnership with the Free Ebook Foundation, Project Gutenberg metadata are available as a downloadable MARC file.
Project Gutenberg’s MARC records, like the collection and most of its titles, are freely available. Libraries and others are encouraged to incorporate Project Gutenberg into their collections, in order to make Project Gutenberg’s titles more widely available at little or no cost.
Note that the MARC metadata include all of the textual titles, but not non-textual titles such as audio, maps, and data sets. Metadata for those other items are available in the XML/RDF metadata described elsewhere on this page.
To read more about the initiative to create the MARC records, including links to the software, issue reporting, and more, see this announcement from the Free Software Foundation: https://ebookfoundation.org/pgmarc.html.
To access Project Gutenberg's MARC records, find information here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html.
* Join Distributed Proofreaders
Visit https://www.pgdp.net to learn about how to help create some of Project Gutenberg's forthcoming eBooks. Proofreading a page a day is easy, fun, and a great way to help bring literature to the world. There are many different roles for the different steps involved in digitizing a printed book to make a Project Gutenberg eBook. Beginners are welcome, and there is an online tutorial to get started.
* Find Project Gutenberg on social media
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Thanks to the Project Gutenberg Social Media Team for keeping these feeds interesting!
* New eBook Listings from March-May 2025
Please see the "GUTINDEX.ALL" or "GUTINDEX.2025" files on the Offline
Catalogs page of https://www.gutenberg.org for these listings.
