You all probably know already the Gutemberg project on the Internet which purpose is to convert to digital format the literature books available within public domain. Most of the time these books are only available on a paper format, the “Distributed Proofreader” workgroup’s aim is to scan, read and correct pages in order for everybody to access it and read literature.

This group, which you can join for help, is doing everything mandatory for books to be available on the Gutemberg site, from reading to multiple pass correcting, in order to suppress all the scan errors and propose a real high value result. Apart proposing literature to people, the great value of this group is the distributed approach: everybody can join and correct pages. It is a really good way to approach books you would never had the idea to open.

The principle is: after creating an account you have to choose a book, different phases are available for each book, the P1 is the easiest, thus the one recommended for rookies. You start proofreading page per page, the screen is split in two parts, on the top the result of the scan machine and on the bottom the OCR text that needs to be read and corrected. Most of the time the correction are very simple, but some can require a good knowledge in the book language and maybe old literature. The time spent on each page is relatively low, you can stop whenever you want and do for example one page a day if you want. The best is probably to spent a bit more time in order to get multiple pages of the same book, it is easier to follow the ideas.

I guess it is the occasion to join a really big project and allow everybody to get access to such great literature books and for sure those from French authors…