Jon Niehof wrote:
DP existed for, what was it? two years? before it became an "official" PG project by demonstrating its effectiveness. Even then, nobody's required to buy into it--you can always submit texts straight to PG. If you build a *reality* that's even a quarter of your vision, it's often far more effective than just talking about the final result. Gradually, people will come to accept it...or not. That's the risk.
Yes, well put. There is an activity going on, with a full-fledged business plan in an advanced stage of development, to implement a next-generation digital library system, called LibraryCity (it is planned to be a non-profit.) In fact, on 28 July, there will be an online conference where we will first publicly present our vision: http://www.planetlibrary.info/lgle200508.htm Our Executive Director, Lori Watrous-deVersterre, will give the presentation. David Rothman and I will also talk about OpenReader, which is only tangentially-related to the interests of the PG/DP crowd. See http://www.openreader.org/ . The "My Antonia" project was simply an "internal demo", although I've brought it up a lot here, to explore some of the issues associated with making public domain texts more accessible in the library, education, research and general "social" and "personal" contexts. It is also intended to aid in better integration of public domain texts with all other kinds of content. This adds a set of requirements, but these requirements are not onerous. When I have given comments on the various changes in both process and philosophy I'd love to see occur in the PG/DP system, these come from having studied, in the last few years, how to make digital texts much more useful for everyone and for all kinds of purposes -- many types of uses and many types of users. Since the PG philosophy has focused on a smaller subset of uses and users for many years, there is, understandably, a general inertia about discussing an expansion of focus, and the additional work product requirements such an expansion of focus requires. Now, the public domain text aspect of LibraryCity is not the main thrust of LibraryCity -- it is just one component and certainly DP and PG prominently figure into our equation -- we want to work with PG and DP for mutual benefit. So should LC not secure even seed funding to finish our demonstration prototype and move to the next level, then the public domain text aspect can certainly be broken out and developed separately -- I'm pretty certain we can package it and get substantial funding interest since we will be able to demonstrate substantial ROI, a well-defined scope with a clear end game, and that it will be of benefit to many. I gave a little more detail on this last night in this forum (gutvol-d) where I described what I had in mind for redoing the top 500 or 1000 English-language classics (the most popular pre-1923 books for English language speakers), in cooperation of course with PG/DP. But it's more than just redoing them ala DP -- it is to make them available in more advanced ways to encourage community to be built around the texts ala LibraryCity principles. Again, doing this sets requirements which are more stringent and specific than what is normally done in PG and DP, but not way outside the scope of what everyone is talking about now (e.g., PGTEI.) Of course the final product will still follow the general philosophy of PG of a free and open Public Domain and will not be incompatible with PG's own activities.
I'd say get some infrastructure in place to support those PM's, CP's, and PP's that agree with, or at least are willing to provide material for, your vision. Keep those scans. Link 'em to the PG texts. Maybe take the guiguts .bin file (for page break information) and use that to set up a user-submitted corrections form like CCEL. Talk to Harry Plantinga--he's both smart and a nice guy. Shucks, there might be CS students at Calvin who'd be looking for a project and could help.
I'm not willing to say "yes, do it this way!" and support changing existing workflow (which was designed to produce PG e-texts) to facilitate your project. But I'm willing to send up the work I've done if it could be useful--a *lot* of CP'ers would love to donate their page scans. Why not start from that and see how it grows?
Again, thanks for your insights and clarification. An important aspect of any project which relies upon volunteers is to find a critical mass of like-minded people who want to see something happen. So one of the reasons I have for addressing philosophical issues in the open here ("what should be done") is to find like-minded folk to join a team effort. It is not easy to do this because of the 80-20 rule taken twice: only 20% of those who hear about something will take some interest, and only 20% of those will actually move from interest to action. I can only do so much alone based on my particular skill and lack thereof -- the rest requires a team effort leveraging the unique talents of each team member. Thanks again, Jon. The other Jon N.