Qapla'! (That's Klingon for Success!)
Oct. 11th, 2009 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beatrice_otterOkay, you all know about Project Gutenberg, right? Project Gutenberg works to get books and magazines that are out of copyright online for free in text form. They've got almost 30,000 books available, with more being added every month, and there are a lot of sites that take books Gutenberg has put up and offer them on their own site. It's awesome. And the process of getting books ready is pretty cool, too. Distributed Proofreaders is a system whereby texts are scanned, OCRed, proofread multiple times, formatted, and made ready for posting. The whole system is designed so that people who want to volunteer their time can do as much or as little as they want, and still contribute. Have twenty minutes to spare? Log on, find a book that interests you, and proofread a single page. Have more time? Do more pages. Alas, there are some steps that simply can't be broken down like that, and content providing--i.e. finding books, scanning, and OCRing them--is one. (Well. A lot of the time, you can use Google Books or The Internet Achive or various university libraries to 'harvest' page scans from, and that speeds things up considerably.)
Well. To make a long story short, I have just finished scanning a book. It is now ready to be handed off to someone else to OCR. The book is True Christianity, by Johann Arndt, which was one of the major Lutheran devotional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was the first spark in what became the Pietism movement within Lutheranism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if a Lutheran household was going to have only two books, chances were one of them was the Bible and the other was True Christianity. Which makes True Christianity a major work, and one that should be easily available, for scholarly research if no other reason. And while part of the book is on Google Books, it is nowhere complete, and the Google Books version isn't that readable, as is so often the case. So I checked an 1863 copy out of the seminary library, borrowed a scanner from a friend, and have spent the last month scanning pages while doing my homework. And it is now finished! Yay! All 542 pages!
Well. To make a long story short, I have just finished scanning a book. It is now ready to be handed off to someone else to OCR. The book is True Christianity, by Johann Arndt, which was one of the major Lutheran devotional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was the first spark in what became the Pietism movement within Lutheranism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if a Lutheran household was going to have only two books, chances were one of them was the Bible and the other was True Christianity. Which makes True Christianity a major work, and one that should be easily available, for scholarly research if no other reason. And while part of the book is on Google Books, it is nowhere complete, and the Google Books version isn't that readable, as is so often the case. So I checked an 1863 copy out of the seminary library, borrowed a scanner from a friend, and have spent the last month scanning pages while doing my homework. And it is now finished! Yay! All 542 pages!