----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> Date: Thursday, January 27, 2005 7:44 pm Subject: Some humble suggestions... Re: [PGCanada] Re: PG-Canada / List of tasks to do
and a level of autonomy with the other groups. The three are:
0) Distributed pre-scanning. This would be semi-structured efforts to obtain ALL the public-domain content in a given area of interest (e.g., every PD book about Cape Breton; 18th-century imprints; imprints in Aboriginal languages; etc., etc.)
1) Scanning
Question: As a bulwark against copyright term extension, as a way of providing at least provisional access to works, and as a way of delivering raw scans to those who will generate, clean and up-mark OCR, should we make the raw scans available online? (My answer: yes.)
2) Cataloging and Copyright Clearance 3) Conversion to structured digital text
The first, scanning, can be done independently. It would seek out old texts to scan which, if public domain, can be placed online. Ask for donations (with a tax deduction to the donor) of old books which are otherwise falling apart, chop them
A lot of books we won't be able to get choppable copies of, and in a lot of cases, won't even need to: I think a key priority should be to beg, bum, borrow, or steal microform scanning capability, and start working our way through the CIHM back-catalogue, supplemented with proofraiding of the main existing Canadian image-libraries (ECO, BNQ, ourroots, etc.)
(In other messages, I referred to the scanning project as Distributed Scanners.)
We can further distribute that task through my "cells" idea, which takes the "team" concept over at PGDP one step further. Cells would be groups would would work more closely together to collect works in a geographical area (the Halifax cell), a given library (the Acadia University cell) or a given field of interest (the Canadian Incunabula cell; the LOTE cell; the Genealogy cell, etc.) They would bootstrap themselves into existence, both on our site, and through outside contacts, and make conscious efforts to assimilate everything and anything that interests them and is clearable. Think LDS genealogists meet the Borg.
The second, cataloging/copyright clearance, will take the scans which have been done, and put together MARC (or equivalent) records for the works (a lot of data can be taken from other libraries.) In addition, the group can do the research on the copyright of the works, which of course the cataloging information is important in the process. And finally, this group can look over the scans to determine if any pages are missing or badly scanned (a sort of QC function).
Again, provisional publication of the scans could help accelerate and distribute that process.