Country Skills blog
I have created a DW feed for Kate's Country Skills blog, ![[syndicated profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/9fca005c7620d5268960268955ab6c463bce9998f9be107197b4f451b08a390e/P2WlxyVijxKvhmhp_stfUkMdsf-ah7h0yFmVCbZBitHe5BHQgcnrB1ghT056GQJiv05e0zTaZg1RFEYV0h4--kJBm3nIevQ:IzaMWozGYmsKZ7kVIMghiQ)
countryskills_feed. It is full of cool things to make, mostly foody but some other stuff too.
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July 16th, 2012On this day in different years
The Library of Lost Books - preserving for posterity
This post is part of the The Library of Lost Books - a project to convert books saved from a library pulp pile into an art exhibition. To fund the exhibition, the Library is selling memberships (for a modest fee) which get you, among other things, access to a members' only blog with contributions from the artists. If you find these posts interesting then please consider joining the Library to see what all the other artists have to say. More details at http://thelibraryoflostbooks.blogs…
The first thing I've been doing with my books is to save them from the pulp pile in another way, by preparing them to add to the wonderful Project Gutenberg. Before I change them beyond recognition I want to make the original text available for anyone interested to read. In case you haven't heard of PG: it's a volunteer-produced repository of (mostly) out of copyright books converted into e-books, 40000 of them, free to download.
For many years I have been a contributor to the largest supplier of these e-books - Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. Back in the early days of PG, e-books were created by devoted individual contributors. PGDP spread the workload - and allowed many more people to contribute - by creating an interface to allow lots of people to do a little bit of work on the same book. You sign up (and I would encourage you to do so :-), choose a book, and are given a page to check. And then, if you like, another... As a way to waste time on the internet it's fantastic - highly addictive, a great community, and useful at the same time!
Of course there is a lot of work involved in getting a book ready to go through the site. Over the past month I have been installing hardware and software to make my scanner run, checking copyright status, scanning the books, splitting and tidying up the scans, finding an OCR engine, making it work in German, OCRing, making nice copies of the figures, and filling in information for the proofreaders. Now, however, everything is ready to roll. If you'd like to get involved then hop along to http://www.pgdp.net and look out for Botticelli and Andrea del Sarto.
A page and a half fell out of Botticelli whilst I was scanning it. I may need to see if I can make it a bit more cohesive...
comments at Dreamwidth
The first thing I've been doing with my books is to save them from the pulp pile in another way, by preparing them to add to the wonderful Project Gutenberg. Before I change them beyond recognition I want to make the original text available for anyone interested to read. In case you haven't heard of PG: it's a volunteer-produced repository of (mostly) out of copyright books converted into e-books, 40000 of them, free to download.
For many years I have been a contributor to the largest supplier of these e-books - Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. Back in the early days of PG, e-books were created by devoted individual contributors. PGDP spread the workload - and allowed many more people to contribute - by creating an interface to allow lots of people to do a little bit of work on the same book. You sign up (and I would encourage you to do so :-), choose a book, and are given a page to check. And then, if you like, another... As a way to waste time on the internet it's fantastic - highly addictive, a great community, and useful at the same time!
Of course there is a lot of work involved in getting a book ready to go through the site. Over the past month I have been installing hardware and software to make my scanner run, checking copyright status, scanning the books, splitting and tidying up the scans, finding an OCR engine, making it work in German, OCRing, making nice copies of the figures, and filling in information for the proofreaders. Now, however, everything is ready to roll. If you'd like to get involved then hop along to http://www.pgdp.net and look out for Botticelli and Andrea del Sarto.
A page and a half fell out of Botticelli whilst I was scanning it. I may need to see if I can make it a bit more cohesive...