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Re: [gutvol-d] Initial thoughts on a PG/DP scan repository
by Joshua Hutchinson 15 Jul '05

15 Jul '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Noring" <jon(a)noring.name> > And finally, since DP is the major player, should we move this > design discussion to the relevant forum at DP? Or keep it here on > gutvol-d? > If you want anything to happen any time soon, keep it here. DP will *not* be moving on this issue any time soon (not without an influx of new developers that decide to push forward on this issue, anyway). As JulietS said, there are plans to get there eventually, but there is a fair bit between where we are now and where that step comes into play. JHutch

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re: [gutvol-d] Scans and Texts (Re: Copyright Verification?)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jul '05

14 Jul '05

marcello said: > Are these scans online and accessible at DP ? > If so, linking them from the PG catalog would be > a matter of a few hours work, > assuming I can get a list of etext-no => page-scan-url would that it were that easy... *** not to pick on marcello, since i wouldn't do that, because i know he does a lot of work on the p.g. site, so he's busy with other things... but... this thread would be a lot more productive if people would familiarize themselves with the actuality of the scans on the d.p. site... some of them are not of very high quality. many of them are not very well-organized. (although it might not appear that way to the naked eye, that last sentence is the very model of understatement.) *** juliet said: > Aside from not having the development resources to > set up some kind of system for accessing and using the scans, > we also have not yet found someone who will wade through > all the archived material to sort it out so that it can actually be used. i heard jon noring volunteering! just three posts back! really! :+) *** david said: > I've looked at a similar system on Project Runeberg, > but it doesn't look very successful at > outputing a number of accurate and complete etexts. > DP does a very good job at keeping attention focused on a few texts > and keeping them moving forward page by page in the system, > where as those system seem to disperse the effort over a lot of books > and a lot of pages that are corrected more or less at random. that's a good analysis. of course, it's also important to note that neither of these projects has volunteers anywhere near the numbers that d.p. has. if they did, their performance would be better; they'd be more focused, and get better results. note that the general problem here -- which is "how do you know when each page is _done_?" -- is one that distributed proofreaders has too. but because of its numbers, and the dedication of its proofers, d.p. has the luxury of answering "when it has gone through x number of rounds." even though that's not the right answer to the question -- the right answer is "when no more changes are being made" -- by the time you've hit 4 rounds (plus post-processing), the odds are much better that all the errors were found. another difference between all of these systems is that the d.p. interface is remarkably better than the others. furthermore, the post-processing apps over at d.p. are some of the best around right now, so that helps too... but if you built a system of continuous proofreading that had an interface as good as the one over at the d.p. site, with as many volunteers spending as much time, and with as much care, it would do as good as d.p. does. or better... still, d.p. _has_ the volunteers, right now, working hard, so there's little need to channel them to another method. they've got a nice little cult there, i mean "community", :+) and as long as they're happy, we should just cheer 'em on. and since there are very few calls -- outside of jon -- for the kind of "transparency with the source materials" that putting scans online would serve, i don't see much point in doing it yet. eventually, diskspace and bandwidth will be plentiful enough to do that without any reservation; but that day ain't here yet. indeed, distributed proofreaders doesn't even leave its scans on brewster's internet archive after that book has gone through proofing, simply because they don't have enough diskspace to do that. it's true. the more important issue here is one that jon is trying to slip under the door while he makes a big noisy distraction -- his emphasis on a complex and heavy form of markup... jon wants you to believe this heavy markup is necessary to deliver a whole bunch of benefits that he will promise. but he has no way to deliver those promises. and i suspect that when he gets deep enough in the fertilizer he's pushing, he'll find his complex systems start tripping over themselves. for instance, even some of the most diehard of x.m.l. people are now saying that x.s.l.t. is too complex for many purposes. or let's look at inter-document linking, which is one of the things that jon likes to say is on his agenda, while he's waving his hands. this is an arena that many good people have wasted a lot of time on. i say "wasted" because either one of two conditions must apply here: 1. documents are permanently available at a u.r.l., or 2. they are not. if condition one is the case, anyone can build an inter-linking system that works perfectly. and if condition two is the case, _nobody_ can. oh, they'll make you _promises_. and they'll be able to build something that _kinda_ works, _most_ of the time anyway. but anyone can do that. so think long, hard, and very carefully about adopting heavy-markup... (but hey, if you _are_ gonna do heavy-markup, _when_will_you_start_? i came to this listserve over a year-and-a-half ago, asking you that, and you _still_ haven't gotten the ball rolling yet. what is the delay, folks?) -bowerbird

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the trouble with listserves
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jul '05

14 Jul '05

the trouble with listserves is that there seems to be no collective memory. so a person -- like jon noring -- can take everyone on a merry-go-round, discussing the same old topics over and over and over and over, without ever building on the wisdom of past trips. and -- like it or not -- jon _is_ the king of vaporware, along with his publicist, david rothman of the "teleblog", where openreader (which, um, does not exist) has been mercilessly flogged to death for the past year and a half. ccel and runeberg might be early examples of "continuous proofreading", but i've laid out a better and more modern description, with demo. the software it requires is so simple to write that i can do it myself. i've also described the whole workflow around it, a workflow that does _not_ have a high cost attached that makes it dependent on the goodwill of volunteers, volunteers who have _not_ flocked to support jon's ideas. so you can settle for jon's handwaving away the problems with his approach if you want to. but why would you? -bowerbird

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Orphan works roundtable
by Wallace J.McLean 13 Jul '05

13 Jul '05

The key point being that the deadline to request a seat at the table is imminent! Get your names in by Friday. The comments and reply comments during the first round of this consultation were very interesting. If anyone who's planning to attend either the Washington or Berkeley sessions would like to discuss (offlist) the failings and foibles of the Canadian "unlocatable" regime, drop me a line. ----- Original Message ----- >From "Branko Collin" <collin(a)xs4all.nl> Date Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:21:10 +0200 To gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject [gutvol-d] round-table consultations on the orphan works issue Someone posted the following to the Project Gutenberg forum of Distributed Proofreaders: "There will be formal round-table consultations on the orphan works issue this month and next: "http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr39341.pdf "Quote: The public roundtable will first be held in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, July 26, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. E.D.T., and on Wednesday, July 27, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. E.D.T. An additional roundtable will be held in Berkeley, California on Tuesday, August 2, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. P.D.T. Requests to participate in the roundtables must be received by the Copyright Office by 5:00 p.m. E.D.T. on July 15, 2005."

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re: [gutvol-d] Copyright Verification?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Jul '05

13 Jul '05

jon said: > My focus on scanning goes beyond just OCR purposes -- > I think if substantial work is being expended to acquire and scan a book, > it takes only a little extra effort to scan at archival quality, which is > at least 600 dpi optical > (and 256 color greyscale for bitonal and even better 24-bit color.) i used to agree with you on this, jon. when a page was originally printed as black ink on white paper, i do not see why to scan it as anything but b/w. you're just increasing the difficulty. it was your example project of scanning "my antonia" that convinced me of this. :+) the huge size of those scans made them unnecessarily hard to create and process, in terms of time, difficulty, and resources. (far more than "only a little extra effort".) the realization struck home more fully with your "kama sutra" scans, when you asked for advice in what was essentially converting them _back_ to black/white. color pages? certainly. scan them in color. black-and-white pages? black-and-white scans. and 300 d.p.i. is probably a high enough resolution. if the future wants 'em higher, let the future scan 'em. > http://www.geoffhorton.com/pictureocr/instructions.html > has an explanation of what I do. geoff, i certainly didn't mean to negate your efforts at using a digital camera to scan. as i've said before, i think if you've figured out the factors that will lead to better results when taking that approach, you've learned some very important information, and i applaud you for stepping forward and sharing it with people... :+) -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] DP ReCoded
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 12 Jul '05

12 Jul '05

juliet said: > Bottlenecks are developing, as we expected that's only natural at first. > Bottlenecks are developing, as we expected > between some of the rounds. But, > the material that gets through the process > is of much higher quality and is making the > jobs of the post-processors much easier. that's great to hear, since a big part of the intent was to address the backlog in the post-processing queue... maybe some volunteers here who tried d.p. and maybe didn't like it too much before will go back and give it a new shot... thanks for the report. i'm glad to hear it's going so well! :+) -bowerbird

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round-table consultations on the orphan works issue
by Branko Collin 12 Jul '05

12 Jul '05

Someone posted the following to the Project Gutenberg forum of Distributed Proofreaders: "There will be formal round-table consultations on the orphan works issue this month and next: "http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr39341.pdf "Quote: The public roundtable will first be held in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, July 26, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. E.D.T., and on Wednesday, July 27, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. E.D.T. An additional roundtable will be held in Berkeley, California on Tuesday, August 2, 2005, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. P.D.T. Requests to participate in the roundtables must be received by the Copyright Office by 5:00 p.m. E.D.T. on July 15, 2005." -- branko collin collin(a)xs4all.nl

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re: [gutvol-d] Copyright Verification?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Jul '05

11 Jul '05

brent said: > Currently in america there is a decline in scanner use. giving the popularity of all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax machines, i don't see how this statement can be justified. and i _most_certainly_ do not see an increase in the numbers of "type-in" projects, not at all! but if _you_ personally wanna type in some books, be my guest! it's a wonderful way to become thoroughly immersed in a text... *** geoff said: > The last, oh, five or six books I've submitted to PGDP > have been photographed (on a 4 MP camera), not scanned. > It's a lot less rough on books, and the results were > as good as scanning once I figured out what I was doing. i'm skeptical of that claim. i think if we tested the quality of the o.c.r. recognition results, using the best-in-class o.c.r. app, we would find a significant difference between images from a 4-m.p. camera and the best-in-class scanners, such as the opticbook3600. and dollar-for-dollar scanners give better images than cameras, though i'm not disputing your assertion that cameras might be "less rough" on the books. just because most of the proofers over at d.p. are not aware that the images they are getting are less-than-the-best doesn't mean it isn't so.. but as long as they don't mind correcting errors that wouldn't even exist if the images were better, or if a better o.c.r. program would have been used, i guess it doesn't matter all that much... -bowerbird

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Copyright Verification?
by Brent Gueth 11 Jul '05

11 Jul '05

I sent an email to the copyright branch of Project Gutenberg (and excuse me if this has been answered, this is my first email to the list), the email was asking for alternate methods of copyright verification submission? Currently in america there is a decline in scanner use. I had a scnaner once upone a time. I think it s still packed away, but there is no software for newer operating systems, and last time I tried to use it didn't work anyway. I do have access to copy machines and fax machines. I also have access to mail these copies in via snail mail. Finally I have access to an 8 megapixel digital camera that could capture the data in just as readable format as a scanner (higher I think then my scnaner could perform). I ahve some books I would love to type in and contribute to the list (I collect antique books) that were published pre 1923. Hence the copyright should be in the clear, though I know this is skepticical legal terriotory. Does anyone know gutenberg's plans going forward for volunteers that: A. Don't have access to a scanner? B. Have books that are important to them so will not mail them off to another volunteer with one c. Have alternate methods to capture the data in equally verifiable means. I think this is something that needs to be looked at going forward, I'm just wondering what my resources I have to look at are now?

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Re: [gutvol-d] Copyright Verification?
by Joshua Hutchinson 11 Jul '05

11 Jul '05

As long as the images from a digital camera are clear, it will work just as well as a scanner. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brent Gueth" <creeva(a)gmail.com> To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject: [gutvol-d] Copyright Verification? Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 04:51:18 -0700 > Finally I have access to an 8 megapixel digital camera that could > capture the data in just as readable format as a scanner (higher I > think then my scnaner could perform).

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