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Just One Page a Day

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-read dept.

Charles Franks writes "Two years ago I started building an online proofreading system as a way to help Project Gutenberg (PG) get more books online: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). The concept is simple, we scan books and load the image and OCR output for each page into the online system. Next, proofreaders compare the OCR text to the image making any corrections as necessary, each page gets looked at twice. Finally the output from the site is massaged into a PG e-text and submitted to PG for posting to the archive. Now, nearly 600 books and a lot of PHP code later, we have snuggled into our new home which is graciously provided by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Now that we have 'real' resources available to us (the original site ran on a Pentium 200 over my 128kbps upstream cablemodem) I would like to invite the online community at large to help us put even more books online. To this end I would like to ask everyone to do 'Just One Page a Day'. Thank you, Charles Franks"

3 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Stop reading this by XiC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And start reading a page!
    After that come back and you may continue();

  2. A better use of time by Apreche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think a better use of time would be to have all these programmers here develop a better OCR. Then you wouldn't need the proofreading and could just feed books into the scanner. I mean there are lots of things wrong with OCR and reasons why it can't be absolutely perfect, but it CAN bet better. If we just write one line of code a day each we'll have better OCR in no time.

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  3. ASCII Only? by vondo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Reading the blurb at the page-a-day site, it says ASCII only where bold is converted to ALL CAPS, the English pound symbol is rendered as "L," etc. No preservation of figures, drawings, or photos.

    This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer. Why not, instead, store docs in some sort of SGML format to handle the special markup (which must be rare) and then down convert to ASCII when needed.

    I've tried reading these things on my Palm. Very difficult. But if I could get a nice typeset PDF version, that would be a whole different story (no pun intended).