For background to address Item 2 of the PG process, I went through a little exercise to put myself in the place of a potential volunteer - someone who would like to contribute a book. What would the experience be like? For a volunteer organization, this kind of person would presumably be worth attracting and trying to recruit. This post describes what I found. Imagine a person, Polly, who is new to Project Gutenberg, and she is only slightly acquainted with Distributed Proofreaders – tried it once, but found it daunting and left (as do most other people who try it). She has a book she wants to contribute. If she starts at PG, it’s likely she will begin with www.gutenberg.org. The first link on the page that looks like it might help is
No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount<http://eb.readingroo.ms/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Needs_Your_Donation>so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing more books <http://www.pgdp.net>, recording audio books<http://librivox.org>, or reporting errors<http://eb.readingroo.ms/wiki/Gutenberg:Contact_Information#Electronic_Mail> .
(She hopes that the order in which the list itemizes the ways she could help is the order in which they prioritize here help.) The option for “digitizing more books” looks promising. She clicks it, and it leads straight to Distributed Proofreading’s main page. Polly would like to try a more direct approach to PG before tackling DP again. Besides her personal experience, she knows about the overhead and delays involved at DP and she’d like more control of her text, and she’d like to do a lot of the work herself. So the next possibility presented on the page is the Self-Publishing site. But no, that’s probably not what she wants; it’s not a new book, and she isn’t the author. But there’s no further guidance on the main page. So she explores some of the non-specific links. Next she finds the “How-To” index, with links to further information. One (and only one) appears promising. It says “Gutenberg:Public Domain eBook Submission How-To”. She tries that next. This page<http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Public_Domain_eBook_Submission_How-To>has a lot of information, but nothing like a checklist, and seems to assume she already knows how the pieces fit together. Primarily, though, it repeatedly refers her back to Distributed Proofreaders. And there are a lot of words and software application names that she doesn’t understand at all. This is beginning to look really complicated and, well, difficult. Intended for people who already know what to do. We could go on and describe what happens when Polly goes next to the DP site, and has similar difficulty finding help (which is mostly in the Wiki, which itself has its challenges.) And substantively, it leads right back to PG for information and procedures that Polly couldn't locate in the PG structure itself. What is clear is that PG doesn't really offer a useful way for potential volunteers to learn how they can contribute. It mostly points to DP. Even to contribute an etext. In terms of order-of-magnitude scalable growth, though, DP, for all its other benefits, is more like the problem than the solution. So new and different procedures need to be considered, not to replace DP, but to give more options to people who don't fit the DP work pattern. Next I'll post some notes I have about some alternatives for handling metadata checklistsand copyright clearance procedures (not necessarily for the PG process, with which I am totally unfamiliar and can't contribute anything, but on the public side of helping ease through to the next step where they have a genuine publishable project.)