Chapter 5

Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle teaches computing - through the Gaelic language - at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. He also maintains the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic. He also maintains European Minority Languages, a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. He wrote in May 2001: "There has been a great expansion in the use of information technology at the Gaelic-medium college here. Far more computers, more computing staff, flat screens. Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, Gaelic online terminology database. More hits on our web site. More use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) now available continuously worldwide via the internet. Major project has been translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of any size available in Gaelic."

Published by SIL International (SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics), The Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages. A paper version and a CD-ROM are also available. Barbara Grimes was the editor of the 8th to 14th editions, 1971-2000. She wrote in January 2000: "It is a catalog of the languages of the world, with information about where they are spoken, an estimate of the number of speakers, what language family they are in, alternate names, names of dialects, other sociolinguistic and demographic information, dates of published Bibles, a name index, a language family index, and language maps."

2000: ONLINE BIBLE OF GUTENBERG

[Overview]

The Bible of Gutenberg went online in November 2000, on the website of the British Library. As we all know, the Bible of Gutenberg is considered as the first print book. Gutenberg printed it in 1455 in Germany, perhaps printing 180 copies, with 48 copies that would still exist in 2000. Three copies - two full ones and one partial one - belong to the British Library. The two full copies - a little different from each other - were digitized in March 2000 by experts from the Keio University of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Communications).

2000: DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADERS

[Overview]

Conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks, Distributed Proofreaders was launched online in March 2001 to help in the digitization of public domain books. The method is to break up the tedious work of checking eBooks for errors into small, manageable chunks. Originally meant to assist Project Gutenberg in the handling of shared proofreading, Distributed Proofreaders has become the main source of Project Gutenberg eBooks. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site. The number of books processed through Distributed Proofreaders has grown fast. In 2003, about 250-300 people were working each day all over the world producing a daily total of 2,500-3,000 pages, the equivalent of two pages a minute. In 2004, the average was 300-400 proofreaders participating each day and finishing 4,000-7,000 pages per day, the equivalent of four pages a minute. Distributed Proofreaders processed a total of 3,000 books in February 2004, 5,000 books in October 2004, 7,000 books in May 2005, 8,000 books in February 2006 and 10,000 books in March 2007, with the help of 36,000 volunteers.

[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]

The main "leap forward" of Project Gutenberg since 2000 is due to Distributed Proofreaders. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site. In May 2006, Distributed Proofreaders became a separate entity and continues to maintain a strong relationship with Project Gutenberg.

Volunteers don't have a quota to fill, but it is recommended they do a page a day if possible. It doesn't seem much, but with hundreds of volunteers it really adds up. In December 2007, five books were produced per day by thousands of volunteers.

From the website one can access a program that allows several proofreaders to be working on the same book at the same time, each proofreading different pages. This significantly speeds up the proofreading process. Volunteers register and receive detailed instructions. For example, words in bold, italic or underlined, or footnotes are always treated the same way for any book. A discussion forum allows them to ask questions or seek help at any time. A project manager oversees the progress of a particular book through its different steps on the website.

The website gives a full list of the books that are: (a) completed, i.e. processed through the site and posted to Project Gutenberg; (b) in progress, i.e. processed through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through their final proofreading and assembly; (c) being proofread, i.e. currently being processed. On August 3, 2005, 7,639 books were completed, 1,250 books were in progress and 831 books were being proofread. On May 1st, 2008, 13,039 books were completed, 1,840 books were in progress and 1,000 books were being proofread.

Each time a volunteer (proofreader) goes to the website, s/he chooses a book, any book. Then one page of the book appears in two forms side by side: the scanned image of one page and the text from that image (as produced by OCR software). The proofreader can easily compare both versions, note the differences and fix them. OCR is usually 99% accurate, which makes for about 10 corrections a page. The proofreader saves each page as it is completed and can then either stop work or do another. The books are proofread twice, and the second time only by experienced proofreaders. All the pages of the book are then formatted, combined and assembled by post-processors to make an eBook. The eBook is now ready to be posted with an index entry (title, subtitle, author, eBook number and character set) for the database. Indexers go on with the cataloging process (author's dates of birth and death, Library of Congress classification, etc.) after the release.

Volunteers can also work independently, after contacting Project Gutenberg directly, by keying in a book they particularly like using any text editor or word processor. They can also scan it and convert it into text using OCR software, and then make corrections by comparing it with the original. In each case, someone else will proofread it. They can use ASCII and any other format. Everybody is welcome, whatever the method and whatever the format.

New volunteers are most welcome too at Distributed Proofreaders (DP), Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC). Any volunteer anywhere is welcome, for any language. There is a lot to do. As stated on both websites, "Remember that there is no commitment expected on this site. Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'."

2000: PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE

[Overview]

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by biomedical scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, from Stanford University, Palo Alto, and University of California, Berkeley. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their most important work: PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007). All PLoS articles are freely available online, and deposited in the free public archive PubMed Central. They can be freely redistributed and reused, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model.

2001: WIKIPEDIA

[Overview]

Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on), Wikipedia has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the internet. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License). Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs a number of other projects, for example Wiktionary - launched in December 2002 - followed by Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikiquote. In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles from 13,000 contributors in 100 languages. Two years later, in December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250 languages.

2001: CREATIVE COMMONS

[Overview]

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As stated on its website, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed works in 2007, and 130 million licensed works in 2008. Science Commons was founded in 2005 to "design strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research." ccLearn was founded in 2007 as "a division of Creative Commons dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources."

2002: MIT OPENCOURSEWARE

[Overview]

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic publishing initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to promote open dissemination of knowledge and information. A pilot version of the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) was available online in September 2002, with 32 course materials of MIT. In September 2003, the site was officially launched with several hundred course materials. In March 2004, 500 course materials were available in 33 different topics. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year. In November 2005, the MIT launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) as a collaboration of educational institutions creating a broad body of open educational content using a share model. One year later, the OCW Consortium included the courses of 100 universities worldwide.

2004: PROJECT GUTENBERG EUROPE

[Overview]

In January 2004, Project Gutenberg spread across the Atlantic with the launching of Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental cultural and educational project located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe is a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all European languages. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages. Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book in May 2005 and its 500th book in October 2008. DP Europe operates under "life +50" copyright laws. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries.

[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]

In 2004, multilingualism became one of the priorities of Project Gutenberg, like internationalization. Michael Hart went off to Europe, with stops in Paris, Brussels and Belgrade. In Belgrade, he met with the team of Project Rastko, to support the creation of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (launched in December 2003) and Project Gutenberg Europe (launched in January 2004).

The launching of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko was indeed a very important step. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders and is dedicated to the proofreading of books for Project Gutenberg Europe. Since the very beginning, DP Europe has been a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. DP Europe was available in 12 languages in April 2004 and 22 languages in May 2008.

The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all the European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide books for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries. The goal is for every country to have its own digital library (according to the country copyright limitations), within a continental network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for the whole planet).

A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalyzed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register). Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe.

In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its 100th book. In June 2005 Project Gutenberg Europe was launched with these first 100 books. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread books in numerous languages. Created in 1991 and widely used since 1998, Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any language, contrary to the much older ASCII that was meant only for English and a few European languages.

On August 3, 2005, 137 books were completed (processed through the site and posted to Project Gutenberg Europe), 418 books were in progress (processed through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through their final proofreading and assembly), and 125 books were being proofread (currently being processed). On May 10, 2008, 496 books were completed, 653 books were in progress and 91 books were being proofread.

2004: GOOGLE BOOKS

[Overview]

In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able to see excerpts from their books and order them online. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a world digital library by digitizing the collections of main partner libraries. The beta version of Google Print went live in May 2005. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of authors and publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books. Google Books has offered books digitized in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library), with either the full text for public domain books or excerpts for copyrighted books. The lawsuit with associations of authors and publishers was settled in October 2008.

[In Depth (published in 2008)]

In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as a project aimed at publishers, for users to be able to see snippets of their books and order them online. The beta version of Google Print went on line in May 2005. In December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project intended for libraries, to build up a digital library of 15 million books by scanning and digitizing the collections of main libraries, beginning with the Universities of Michigan (7 million books), Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library. The planned cost was an average of US $10 per book, and $150 to $200 million on ten years. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books.

Google Books was launched in August 2006 to replace the controversial Google Print, stopped in August 2005 because of main copyright concerns. Google Books offers excerpts of books digitized by Google in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid and New York Public Library). Google scans 3,000 books a day, including copyrighted books. The inclusion of copyrighted books is widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the US, lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption is that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringes copyright laws, even if only snippets are made freely available on the search engine. To counteract copyright concerns and the problems of a closed platform, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with the goal of digitizing only public domain books and make them searchable and downloadable through any search engine.

2005: OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE

[Overview]

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was conceived by the Internet Archive in early 2005 to offer broad, public access to the world culture. It was launched in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The project aims at digitizing public domain books around the world and make them searchable through any web search engine and downloadable for free. Unlike the Google Print project, the OCA scans and digitizes only public domain books, except when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in the United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media and Prelinger Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text Archive of the Internet Archive. In December 2006, they reached a milestone of 100,000 digitalized books publicly available, with 12,000 new books added per month. Two years later, in December 2008, one million books were "posted under OCA principles or otherwise public domain hosted by the Internet Archive."

2006: MICROSOFT LIVE SEARCH BOOKS

[Overview]

Microsoft has also participated in the Open Content Alliance (OCA), launched by the Internet Archive in October 2005. In December 2006, Microsoft released the beta version of Live Search Books. The book search engine performs keyword searches for non copyrighted books digitized by Microsoft from the collections of the British Library, University of California, and University of Toronto, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public Library and Cornell University. Books offer full text views and can be downloaded in PDF files. In the future, Microsoft intends to add copyrighted works with the permission of their publishers. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements with several main publishers, including Cambridge University Press and McGraw Hill. After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal articles, Microsoft ended the Live Search Books program in May 2008 and closed the website.

2006: FREE WORLDCAT

[Overview]

WorldCat was created in 1971 by the non-profit OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) as the union catalog of the university libraries in the State of Ohio. Over the years, OCLC became a national and worldwide library cooperative, and WorldCat the largest library catalog in the world. In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400 languages from 9,000 member libraries (paid subscription) in 112 countries. In 2006, 73 million bibliographic records were linking to 1 billion documents available in these libraries. In August 2006, WorldCat began to migrate to the web through the beta version of the new website WorldCat.org. Member libraries now provide free access to their catalogs and electronic resources: books, audio books, abstracts and full-text articles, photos, music CDs and videos. Another pioneer site was RedLightGreen, launched in Spring 2004 (with a beta version in Fall 2003) as the web version of the RLG Union Catalog, another major union catalog created in 1980 by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). RedLightGreen ended its service in November 2006, after a successful 3-year run, and RLG joined OCLC.

[In Depth (published in 1999)]

In 1998, two organizations - OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and RLIN (Research Library Information Network) - were running international bibliographical databases through the internet.

The OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a non-profit, membership, library computer service and research organization dedicated to furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs. More than 27,000 libraries in 65 countries were using OCLC services to manage their collections and to provide online reference services. The website was available in English, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

OCLC services included: access services; collections and technical services; reference services; resource sharing; Dewey Decimal Classification (published by OCLC Forest Press); and preservation resources. From its headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC operated one of the world's largest library information networks. Libraries in the US joined OCLC through their OCLC-affiliated regional networks. Libraries outside the US received OCLC services through OCLC Asia Pacific, OCLC Canada, OCLC Europe, OCLC Latin America and the Caribbean, or via international distributors.

OCLC was also running WorldCat - the name of the OCLC Online Union Catalog - which is a merged electronic catalog of library catalogs around the world, and the world's largest bibliographic database with its 38 million records (in early 1998) in 400 languages (with transliteration for non-Roman languages), and an annual increase of 2 million records.

WorldCat stemmed from a concept which is the same for all union catalogs: earn time to avoid the cataloguing of the same document by many catalogers worldwide. When they are about to catalog a publication, the catalogers of the member libraries search the OCLC catalog. If they find the record, they copy it in their own catalog and add some local information. If they don't find the record, they create it in the OCLC catalog, and this new record is immediately available to all the catalogers of the member libraries worldwide.