Hi Bill. Thanks for the question. As others have mentioned, yes the error-checking tools that have been developed by PG volunteers do focus mostly on flagging OCR-type errors. However, don't let that stop you. If you have not done so yet, you may want to start browsing through the PG faq: http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/ I find that typing out a whole book does give you a more "holistic" view of the book itself. These days, most items being added to PG have come through Distributed Proofers, but not all. Typing out a full book is a decent-sized undertaking. (The first time you try it, it generally feels like an impossible undertaking. This gets easier after you've done a few books this way.) I would strongly suggest that you spend two weeks proofing individual pages at DP before you try a whole book on your own. This will give you a taste of the "issues you have not imagined yet". Also, there a support network of volunteers around, so don't be afraid to ask questions. Andrew On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Bill Landis wrote:
Greetings!
I'm new to Project Gutenberg, but for the moment at least mildly excited about the possibility of helping out. As one of the FAQs suggest, I will probably start out with a bit of "distributed proofreading" over at http://www.pgdp.net
Looking forward to the possibility of actually producing texts, I'm curious about the pros and cons of scanning vs typing. My impression is that scanning offers the relatively significant bonus of at least potentially having the scanned images available along with the text for proofreading and/or posterity. Scanning involves the page flipping or cutting and aligning or sheetfeeding plus all the technical wrangling involved in OCR compared to the, well, typing involved in typing. I'm guessing a decent typist is still superior to OCR from the proofreading point of view.
Is my initial preference for typing (partially as an excuse to see how high I can push my typing speed ;) enough of a reason to ignore the "added value" of having scanned pages available?
Ok, so these are largely rhetorical questions I suppose, but I'd love to hear any opinions and feedback (especially on issues I seem to have overlooked and likely haven't even imagined).
Thanks.
--Bill Landis bill.landis@gmail.com _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d