Michael Dyck wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
If we cater to scholars, we are only expanding the "digital divide," so to speak. Our goal is to provide a large viable library to all, not just to the scholars, who represent less than 1% of the people, and are often very elitist.
I don't think anyone is advocating providing the PG library "just to the scholars", so that's a strawman.
Instead, some people simply want to make PG texts more useful to scholars than they currently are, and I think we can do that without making them less useful or less available to non-scholars.
Agreed. It is possible to come up with a "happy medium" set of baseline requirements which will make the PG texts useful for many purposes. Those who wish to make particular texts even more useful than the baseline for a particular user group simply add more stuff. XML makes it quite easy to extend the features -- just add markup to the content and to the metadata fields. A possibly useful exercise is to categorize the various uses and user groups, and then determine what are the most important features each user group especially desires/needs. Without thinking about it for more than 30 seconds, here's a partial list of different user groups. No doubt this list can be expanded and much better described/subcategorized. But it's a start to further discussion if enough here deem it of interest. 1) Personal interest readers 2) Scholars and researchers 3) Students (K-12 and post-secondary) 4) Professional and vocational Jon Noring