Distributed Proofreaders
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Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a project to support the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg.
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[edit] History
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.
On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to greatly increase the quantity and quality of e-text production. Distributed Proofreaders posted their 5,000th text to Project Gutenberg in August 2004, and in March 2007, the 10,000th DP-produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. As of December 2007 the 11,000+ DP-contributed e-texts comprised almost half of works in Project Gutenberg.
On 31 July 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status. IRS approval of section 501(c)(3) status was granted retroactive to 7 April 2006.
[edit] Proofreading process
Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or culled from digitalization projects and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Since OCR software is presently far from perfect, often a large number of errors appear in the resulting text. To deal with this, individual pages are made available to volunteers via a web-based interface to proofread, displaying the original page's image and the recognized text side-by-side. This effectively distributes the time-consuming error correction process, analogously to distributed computing.
Each page goes through multiple rounds of proofreading and formatting, after which a "post-processor" combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.
Besides custom software created to support the proofreading project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordination and community building.
[edit] Related Projects
[edit] DP Europe
In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko. This site has the ability to process text in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Books proofread are centered mainly on European culture, with a large proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and many others. As of December 2007, DP Europe had produced over 480 e-texts.
DP is sometimes referred to as "DP International" by members of DP Europe. However, DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain according to U.S. copyright law before they can be proofread at DP.
[edit] DP Canada
On 1 December 2007, Distributed Proofreaders Canada launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity. All of its projects are posted to Project Gutenberg Canada, which launched on Canada Day 2007.
In addition to preserving Canadiana, DP Canada is notable because it is the first major effort to take advantage of Canada's copyright laws which may allow more works to be preserved. Like copyright law in most other countries, Canada has a "life plus 50" copyright term. This means that works by authors who died more than fifty years ago may be preserved in Canada, whereas in other parts of the world those works may not be distributed because they are still copyright.
Notable authors whose works may be preserved in Canada but not other parts of the world include A. A. Milne, Walter de la Mare, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Amy Carmichael.
[edit] 10,000th E-book
On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced completing more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a block of 15 titles was published:
- Slave Narratives, Oklahoma (A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) by the U.S. Work Projects Administration (English)
- Eighth annual report of the Bureau of ethnology. (1891 N 08 / 1886–1887) edited by John Wesley Powell (English)
- R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs by Randolph Caldecott [Illustrator] (English)
- Como atravessei Àfrica (Volume II) by Serpa Pinto (Portuguese)
- Triplanetary by E. E. "Doc" Smith (English)
- Heidi by Johanna Spyri (English)
- Heimatlos by Johanna Spyri (German)
- October 27, 1920 issue of Punch (English)
- Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees by John Evelyn (English)
- Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese de Dillmont (English)
- The annals of the Cakchiquels by Francisco Ernantez Arana (fl. 1582), translated and edited by Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899) (English with Central American Indian)
- The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties (1921) by Richard Runciman Terry (1864–1938) (English)
- Le marchand de Venise by William Shakespeare, translated by François Guizot (French)
- Agriculture for beginners, Rev. ed. by Charles William Burkett (English)
- Species Plantarum (Part 1) by Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) (Latin)
