Sorry for my extremely delayed reply on this. I've been crazy with school, work, and possible testicular cancer. I'm definitely interested in implementing many of the ideas you talk about in your series (as well as this email). People at the archive seem vaguely interested, but not as much as I'd have hoped. Basically, it's "my project" to manage and "sell" to the upper folx. I suppose we'll see where that goes. Thanks again! Alex On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 7:48 PM, <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:

alex said:

...

   That one wasn't so hard, keep trying, "old man!" :)

sure thing, kid...       ;+)

...

   I have to say I agree with you entirely here.    It's something I really want the archive to fix

good!

...

   I will certainly (and delicately, heh) bring this up    at the next collections meeting with my boss,    to see what/if she thinks we might do.

well, i never had the ability to sweet-talk a boss, so i'll leave that bit up to you, for the most part...

but odds are that she will give you the "standard" response of "there's not much we can do about it";

and, sadly, she might really believe that...  many do, which is precisely why the problem has been ignored.

but that's wrong -- completely wrong -- dead wrong...

there is a _lot_ that can be done to improve that text.

let's take a good look at it, and we'll see why.

first, probably the most distracting thing about it is the presence of the runheads, a terrible irritation, both esthetically and visually and in reader-attention.

yet it's very easy to get rid of 'em, even automatically.

that, all by itself, would be a tremendous improvement.

pagenumbers are much the same.

and spacey punctuation is a _constant_ in these books, yet it too is a problem that can be fixed automatically...

again, the application of merely these _automatic_ fixes would do much to improve the texts, at least to the point where the users would no longer feel _insulted_ by them.

moreover, as my recent series (not to mention all of the similar series i've done over the years) has clearly shown, the rest of the steps that need to be taken to clean a text are extremely straightforward, and elementary to code, such that a _system_ for _end-users_ to _fix_the_texts_ could easily be put in place, for only a minimal expense, which is something archive.org shoulda done years ago... in return, archive.org gets text that it can be _proud_ of.

-bowerbird

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