Re: PG editorial policy? [Re: [gutvol-d] Fw: [gweekly] 15,000th Project Gutenberg eBook Released]
You are touching here the problem of the (lack of) editorial policy of PG / PGDP.
Why is this a problem? And if you see it as a problem, why don't you fix it? Jon Ingram thought that PG was missing good, complete editions of Chaucer and Pope and Dryden and Wordsworth, but instead of trying to tell me what to scan, he started scanning complete editions of those authors. It's a much more productive solution.
All this makes for a not very coherent, consistent editorial policy. I guess literature people can easily criticize the PG French catalog (some very obscure books, and some blatant misses).
It's called a library. I'm sitting in a library that reached two million volumes a few years ago, and they have some very obscure books, and at the same time has some blatant misses. (For example, they have only 10 volumes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and half of those are in special collections.)
They're not hackers, they don't have this culture of "let's get involved, roll up our sleeves and change the world", but still they could be useful to PG.
How? Like many volunteer groups, we already have many people who want to run things already. Like many successful volunteer groups, PG goes out of its way to give a lot of freedom to the people actually doing the work. If they're not willing to roll up their sleeves and do something, how can they be useful to PG? -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
Sebastien Blondeel wrote:
All this makes for a not very coherent, consistent editorial policy. I guess literature people can easily criticize the PG French catalog (some very obscure books, and some blatant misses).
There's a case to be made that those obscure books are exactly the ones that need scanning and archiving most badly. I'm sure cheap copies of classic works will always be relatively easily available, but who is going to reprint all those long-forgotten authors whose works are wasting away in attics and recycle shops? I'm all in favour of getting more obscure books into PG. To me PG is a museum as much as it is an archive. Miranda
On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 12:43:16PM -0800, D. Starner wrote:
You are touching here the problem of the (lack of) editorial policy of PG / PGDP.
Why is this a problem? And if you see it as a problem, why don't you fix it? Jon Ingram thought that PG was missing good, complete editions of Chaucer and Pope and Dryden and Wordsworth, but instead of trying to tell me what to scan, he started scanning complete editions of those authors. It's a much more productive solution.
All this makes for a not very coherent, consistent editorial policy. I guess literature people can easily criticize the PG French catalog (some very obscure books, and some blatant misses). ...
Just a quick note: the question was not really about editorial policy, but collection development policy. We *do* have an editorial policy, which is spelled out in our FAQ & in DP's procedures (some of it is enforced, some is just guidance). As far as collection development (which is a course you can take in most Library Science degree programs, BTW): I once started to try to write our PG collection development policy. What I realized is that we really already have one, even though it's not spelled out explicitly as such. It's what people have said in this thread: those who do the work to create eBooks get to see those eBooks go into the collection. This de facto collection development policy permeates many of our documents, such as http://gutenberg.org/about Sometimes "the work" is more than just finding/scanning/OCRing/ proofing a particular book. For example, people who want to use particular languages, fonts etc. that don't work as well with OCR software & the existing software at DP or elsewhere might find they need to develop some additional infrastructure to get going. But for most books (I'd guess well over 90% of printed items in the public domain, worldwide, in any language), the work simply consists of doing the scanning, OCR & proofing. Working with DP might be a great fit, or you might prefer to do your own project solo. As always, there are larger issues (for example, how contemporary works, audio eBooks, video, etc. fit with our main focus on public domain from print). But on the whole, I think we have a very clear & unambiguous collection development policy. -- Greg
participants (3)
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D. Starner -
Greg Newby -
Miranda van de Heijning