Project Gutenberg Request for Support
- How You Can Help

By Michael Hart

May 18 2001

Copyright

Project Gutenberg will do copyright research for you if you send us xeroxes of the title page [both sides, even if one side is blank.]

We need people to hunt through libraries or bookstores for editions that we can use to legally prepare our Electronic Texts [Etexts.]

Germany, Italy and Great Britain have each extended their copyright to "life + 70 years," as opposed to the "life +50 years" of "Berne" copyright conventions. Residents of those areas will have to be an extra bit careful, as a million items that used to be Public Domain in those countries reverted to copyright status, even though a vast majority of them are no longer for sale. This is now true for some other countries, including France and perhaps Brazil and Portugal.

More on the United States Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 in a "More Detailed Information" section below.

Scanning and Typing

Once we have located some proper edition[s], then our volunteers do the books by scanning or typing them into the computer. Usually it is the same person who does the proofreading, but not necessarily.

If you have a scanner, or have access to one, or plan to get one in the future, please contact our Director of Production, Dianne Bean, beandp@primenet.com, with a cc: to me at hart@pobox.com

Proofreading

Often the only way for many of our volunteers to work on Etexts for us is if they can ship their book to one of you, have it scanned in and then returned to them for proofreading.

If you could do the scanning for them, it would help us immensely.

FTP and WWW Sites

We would very much like to provide better access to Etext for sites in Africa and South America, and other locales. If you know anyone who might be able to help with this, please read this:

We are always in search of more FTP and World Wide Web sites, so an increasing number of people can download our books without unusual, even often fatal, delays and glitches in transmission.

If you, or someone you know, can spare a gigabyte on their servers, please have them contact us about creating more mirror sites. This is a particular need for countries south of the equator, where text files are only available on one server that we know of. If you can help us get our books into South America, Africa, and further, this would be a great help. We have something restarted in New Zealand, with extensions into Australia, but the load this server can handle is probably going to be easily exhausted.

Donations

Project Gutenberg is almost completely dependent on your donations.

Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in: Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states. These donations should be made to the "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" and mailed to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Anything you can do in this are would be greatly appreciated, even, since we are at this juncture, helping us get more Public Relations coverage of our 4,000th Etext.

Project Gutenberg sites up updated more than once a day on average, since we are presenting 600 Etexts per year, and plan to move to at least 1,000 per year after the "official" listing of 2002.

As I said, anything would be greatly appreciated. This SHOULD BE a great time to get some PR. . .but it still appears, even though the project has been written up probably about 200 times, that they are going to write us up when THEY have a reason to rather than when WE have a reason, and we feel it is now time to try to break out of an entirely too limiting niche in the computer oriented media, and get some more general publicity out there to the millions of people who aren't computer oriented at all, but will would like to receive the Etexts for education or entertainment. This is a majority of world population centers, and we should do more to reach them.

If you have any "ins" in the press or with the corporate world, this would be a good time to use them.

Raiders of the Lost Archives

As you may be aware from several events of a month ago, and earlier, there is a downside to having Etext archives in limited distribution modalities, simply because if one site, or one person, or even whole countries, change their minds about what they are going to archive-- then the whole world loses access to those files.

A good example was the loss of The Oxford Book of English Verse from Project Bartleby. We have taken great pains to get this book, which is undoubtedly important, back on the Net. If you want to see which sites have lost this file, just do a Yahoo search for the book, then count the vast number of sites that have blank entries for the book, once it was deleted from a multiplicity of links; this is an example of how important it is for Etexts to be posted on many sites, rather than just one site will many links to it!!!

We need volunteers who will search the world for every possible book and help us preserve it.

Project Gutenberg will not release any of this material until we can do the copyright research and prove it belongs in the Public Domain.

We realize that many of our volunteers sometimes get frustrated that we do this research, which possibly takes half our time, but it will become more and more apparent why this is a good policy as copyright laws become stiffer and stiffer, and world intellectual property can be limited in greater and great ways. It is quite likely that it is going to be some time in the next calendar year that a United States law killing off another 20 years of public domain in the US will get passed, to join the countries listed above, in eliminating a million books from potentially being posted as Etexts, even though 99% are a dead issue, out of print for decades. . . .

Special Requests

We occasionally receive scanned material which could have benefitted from more cleanup before it was sent to us. What we need is proofers with patience to read through an etext and take out stray letters, clean up the punctuation, and send a list of questionable lines to the person who scanned it so they can send corrections to be inserted. This usually takes a couple of weeks, and is a good short-term project for folks who want to get their feet wet with Project Gutenberg. Dianne Bean

Programming

Due to the various formats in which we receive many of our Etexts, we need some assistance in writing PERL scripts, vi scripts, or an assortment of other scripts that will assist our proofreaders, and our editors, in dealing with page numbers, markups, italics and an assortment of other formatting issue that come up time to time.

Most of these are fairly trivial and can be solved with a one line script for each of the particular situations and we just need some people to either run the scripts we already have, or to write some new ones from time to time when a particularly rough Etext version arrives at our doorstep. These scripts, which take minutes to set up, and seconds to run, can save HOURS of proofreaders' time. You can be a BIG help just running some of these scripts for us, or in writing or rewriting some of them on occasion.

More Info