Hi all. Sorry to drop in out of the blue like this. Russell McO sent an email to another list I'm on--fyi, this is what it generated--he thought it might be useful to you. I'm afraid that I have no time or expertise to lend to PGCanada, but do encourage those who do to contact some of the people mentioned below at CIHM, UofT, etc. I don't know the backgrounds of the people on this list, so please don't take this as a criticism, but in general I tend to think that there is greater point AND greater legal safety in a project that comes demonstrably out of a genuine desire to share literature than one that is mainly trying to make a point. If somebody wants to go and put GWTW up there online, that's fine, but I would think that PG would want to protect its brand name as it were and see a full-fledged site going even if it takes longer. Maybe there are Canlit people there who want such a site. You might try to contact Can lit profs--two at my university are Tracy Ware and Leslie Ritchie--and see if it's something they'd need or like to see or like to help with, and/or how it would complement existing resources. Grad students in English would be a great group to tap too. Or Library Science students. I'd love to see it there but I have to limit myself to spectatorship at the moment. All the very best, L. On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Wallace J.McLean wrote:
I've previously posted a link to the second-largest Canadian "public domain" project I know of, Classiques des sciences sociales:
http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/ html/ biblio_accueil.html
The largest is, of course, canadiana.org CIHM has an understanding with Project Gutenberg in the US that PG can use any of their book scans of works which are eligible under the PG copyright rules (the US law). In fact, a PG volunteer has produced a wonderful program called "Snatch" which automates the process of downloading public-domain book scans from various sites around the world, including canadiana.org, to accellerate the conversion process. These scans are then run through Distributed Proofreading: www.pgdp.net
This infrastructure has already been "exported" to a similar project in Europe. However, even though the single largest national "team" of PDGP volunteers is Team Canada, PG-Canada just doesn't seem to want to fly.
There's also ourroots.ca, which is a mishmash of PD- and non-PD material, but I understand Snatch has been re-written to extract page scans from that site as well. ourroots.ca concentrates on local histories (which may or may not be PD), while canadiana.org concentrates on historic Canadian of all types (most of which is PD, and CIHM has an "unlocatable" license to cover its ass in the outlying cases.)
And from me earlier the same day: Hi. I'd recommend contacting Ian Lancashire at UofT who does the Representative Poetry project (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/index.cfm). If he isn't interested in hosting/helping, he will know others. I don't know who Daryl is, but it would be nice to get some literary people involved so it wasn't just done to make a point, but rather to make literary materials available... ;-). There are probably Canadian literary ezines out there who might be into it. Or check out Coach House Press? All for now, L. Laura J. Murray Associate Professor Department of English Queen's University Kingston, Canada K7L 3N6 phone: 613-533-6000 x74438 fax: 613-533-6872 email: LM19@post.queensu.ca website: www.faircopyright.ca