Michael, Thanks for your message. Disclaimer: These comments are just my personal opinion, based on what I've seen from being involved with PG for a decent number of years. Yes, PG volunteers have found that, for many purposes, a text or html file can be preferable to a pdf. To start with, you have a smaller file size, which makes the file more accessible over slow connections. You can also run into extra difficulties if you want to update the file, or correct some errors that are found in a year or two's time. In my own experience, lots of illustrations certainly does add to the complexity of the task. One point to consider about looking for volunteers from the LIS community, is that you might be getting yourself into a big discussion of markup, encoding process, documentation, etc. before you get going. Have you done much work transcribing books before? If you were a new PG volunteer, I would gently suggest that a project of this nature is too much to tackle, and point you towards www.pgdp.net to start with some easy pages there. You ask "Does Project Gutenberg already have resources available that could help us?" Interesting question. By far the biggest resource the PG has is many volunteers who directly (or indirectly) contribute to it. If you have any specific requests or problems, we could probably direct you to someone who has dealt with it before. (With 18,000 books, we've had plenty of issues to deal with.) For a general overview, you could try reading: http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/ although some of the material there is slightly outdated now. Of course the tempting possibility I could mentioned is requesting non-exclusive permission for PG to distribute this text, and then we could run it through Distributed Proofreaders. Andrew On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Michael May wrote:

Hi all,

I am Michael May, new "Classics Editor" at dLIST, the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/

dLIST has received written permission from the copyright owner of works by S.R. Ranganathan to post electronic copies of several of SRR's books at the dLIST site, including the original 1931 edition of The Five Laws of Library Science, the main premise of which is "Books are for use!" Despite being out of print (a reprint is planned for later this year by Ess Ess Publications of India <http://www.essessreference.com/servlet/esgetbiblio?n=000313>), Five Laws is arguably the most important work in library science to date.

We have experimented with PDF by posting the prefatory pages and Chapter 1 here: http://genie.sir.arizona.edu/1115/

However, Five Laws is over 500 pages and includes numerous illustrations. I believe a text or html version would be much easier to access and preserve.

What advice do you have about how to proceed? I was thinking about starting by recruiting volunteers from the LIS community to transcribe the text. What should I think about or plan for before asking people to help? Does Project Gutenberg already have resources available that could help us?

I'd very much appreciate any suggestions or advice.

Thanks.

Mike