
Although I agree with Michael that there is no need to preserve things as linebreaks in most texts -- if you really need to go to that level of detail, there is always the original or the scans to fall back upon -- I want to make a case for preserving page numbers, if not at least as recognisable anchors in text, and only for those books being referenced to regularly by other books. This excludes most fiction, but is particularly important for scientific works, which have constructed a kind of paper web with cross references mainly based on page numbers. In long term, such references of course should give way to proper references to the actual paragraph or sentence being referenced, but as a practical ad-interim solution, staying with page numbers will increase the number of texts we can digitize with our limited means. This leads me to one place where further work could be done on the PG collection: turning it from a collection of static texts into an enriched web of knowledge. I've seen a lot of websites grabbing all of PG, and republishing it in a slightly modified form. I would however, like to see the collection be incorporated in a kind of wiki-like system, where people can add -- without tampering with the static source texts -- annotations, add tagging and create live cross references: both for own use, smaller dissemination in a group or publicy. I've added a large number of texts related to the Philippines to PG, and many of these text interact. Some critize each other, others provide opposing views, and so forth. It would be great to build a system that makes that easy to follow for everybody, such that people can immediately see, when reading a text, where it has been cited or referenced in other works. It would be great also to provide study introductions or synopises, to give users a grasp of the material, and enable them to find what they really need within reasonable time. Search enginges are a great tool, but only to a certain extend. Jeroen.