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Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of
e-text e-text (from "''electronics, electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any Electronic document, document that is read in digital data, digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a compute ...
s for
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...
by allowing many people to work together in
proofreading Proofreading is a phase in the process of publishing where galley proofs are compared against the original manuscripts or graphic artworks, to identify transcription errors in the typesetting process. In the past, proofreaders would place corr ...
drafts of e-texts for errors. the site had digitized 48,000 titles.


History

Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...
. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002. On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to increase the quantity and quality of e-text production. In July 2015, the 30,000th Distributed Proofreaders produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg, . On 31 July 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and
not-for-profit A not-for-profit or non-for-profit organization (NFPO) is a Legal Entity, legal entity that does not distribute surplus funds to its members and is formed to fulfill specific objectives. While not-for-profit organizations and Nonprofit organ ...
status.
IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting Taxation in the United States, U.S. federal taxes and administerin ...
approval of section
501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, Trust (business), trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of ...
status was granted retroactive to 7 April 2006.


Proofreading process

Public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers, or sourced from digitization projects and the images are run through
optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronics, electronic or machine, mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo ...
(OCR)
software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
. Since OCR software is far from perfect, many errors often appear in the resulting text. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side. This process thereby distributes the time-consuming error-correction process, akin to
distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...
. Each page is proofread and formatted several times, and then a post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg. Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.


Related projects


DP Europe

In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by
Project Rastko Project Rastko — Internet Library of Serb Culture () is a non-profit and non-governmental publishing, cultural and educational project dedicated to Serb and Serb-related arts and humanities. It is named after Rastko Nemanjić. Project The pro ...
, Serbia. This site had the ability to process text in
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...
encoding. Books proofread centered on European culture, with a considerable proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and many others. , DP Europe had produced 787 e-texts, the last of these in November 2011. The original DP is sometimes referred to as "DP International" by members of DP Europe. However, DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the
public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
according to U.S.
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...
law before they can be proofread and eventually published at DP.


DP Canada

In December 2007,
Distributed Proofreaders Canada Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DP Canada) is a volunteer organization that transfers books into electronic format and releases them as public domain books in formats readable by electronic devices. It was launched in December 2007 and has publi ...
launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity. All its projects are posted to Faded Page, their book archive website. In addition, it supplies books to Project Gutenberg Canada (which launched on
Canada Day Canada Day, formerly known as Dominion Day, is the national day of Canada. A Public holidays in Canada, federal statutory holiday, it celebrates the anniversary of Canadian Confederation which occurred on July 1, 1867, with the passing of the B ...
2007) and (where copyright laws are compatible) to the original Project Gutenberg. In addition to preserving Canadiana, DP Canada is notable because it is the first major effort to take advantage of Canada's copyright laws which may allow more works to be preserved. Unlike copyright law in some other countries, Canada has a "life plus 50" copyright term. This means that works by authors who died more than fifty years ago may be preserved in Canada, whereas in other parts of the world those works may not be distributed because they are still under copyright. Notable authors whose works may be preserved in Canada but not in other parts of the world include
Clark Ashton Smith Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories and poetry, and an artist. He achieved early recognition in California (largely through the enthusiasm ...
,
Dashiell Hammett Samuel Dashiell Hammett ( ; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade ('' The Ma ...
,
Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway ( ; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized fo ...
,
Carl Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. A prolific author of Carl Jung publications, over 20 books, illustrator, and corr ...
,
A. A. Milne Alan Alexander Milne (; 18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956) was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as children's poetry. Milne was primarily a playwright before the huge success of Winnie-th ...
, Dorothy Sayers,
Nevil Shute Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 189912 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name to protect his enginee ...
,
Walter de la Mare Walter John de la Mare (; 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem "The Listeners", and for his psychological horror short fi ...
, Sheila Kaye-Smith and
Amy Carmichael Amy Beatrice Carmichael (15 December 1867 – 18 January 1951) was an Irish Christian missionary in India who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur. She served in India for 55 years and wrote 35 books about her work as a mission ...
.


Milestones


10,000th E-book

On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced the completion of more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a collection of fifteen titles was published: * ''Slave Narratives, Oklahoma'' (A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) by the U.S.
Work Projects Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...
(English) * ''Eighth annual report of the Bureau of ethnology''. (1891 N 08 / 1886–1887) edited by
John Wesley Powell John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 – September 23, 1902) was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He ...
(English) * ''R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs'' by
Randolph Caldecott Randolph Caldecott ( ; 22 March 1846 – 12 February 1886) was a British artist and illustrator, born in Chester. The Caldecott Medal was named in his honour. He exercised his art chiefly in book illustrations. His abilities as an artist were pr ...
llustrator(English) * ''Como atravessei Àfrica'' (Volume II) by Serpa Pinto (Portuguese) * ''Triplanetary'' by E. E. "Doc" Smith (English) * ''Heidi'' by
Johanna Spyri Spyri (; ; 12 June 1827 – 7 July 1901) was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories. She wrote the popular book ''Heidi''. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur i ...
(English) * ''Heimatlos'' by Johanna Spyri (German) * October 27, 1920 issue of '' Punch'' (English) * ''Sylva, or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees'' by
John Evelyn John Evelyn (31 October 162027 February 1706) was an English writer, landowner, gardener, courtier and minor government official, who is now best known as a diary, diarist. He was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. John Evelyn's Diary, ...
(English) * ''Encyclopedia of Needlework'' by Therese de Dillmont (English) * ''The annals of the Cakchiquels'' by Francisco Ernantez Arana (
fl. ''Floruit'' ( ; usually abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for 'flourished') denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indic ...
1582), translated and edited by Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899) (English with Central American Indian) * ''The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties'' (1921) by Richard Runciman Terry (1864–1938) (English) * ''Le marchand de Venise'' by
William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
, translated by
François Guizot François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (; 4 October 1787 – 12 September 1874) was a French historian, orator and Politician, statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics between the July Revolution, Revolution of 1830 and the Revoluti ...
(French) * ''Agriculture for beginners'', Rev. ed. by Charles William Burkett (English) * ''Species Plantarum'' (Part 1) by
Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné,#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming o ...
(Carl von Linné) (Latin)


20,000th E-book

On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books: * ''The Renaissance in Italy–Italian Literature, Vol 1'',
John Addington Symonds John Addington Symonds Jr. (; 5 October 1840 – 19 April 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although mar ...
(English with Italian) * ''Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger; erster Teil'',
H. A. Guerber Hélène Adeline Guerber (March 9, 1859 – May 26, 1929), also known as H.A. Guerber, was an American writer of books, most of which were lively retellings of myths, legends, folklore, plays, epic poetry, operas and history. She was also a teacher ...
(German with English) * ''Gedichte und Sprüche'',
Walther von der Vogelweide Walther von der Vogelweide (; ) was a Minnesänger who composed and performed love-songs and political songs ('' Sprüche'') in Middle High German. Walther has been described as the greatest German lyrical poet before Goethe; his hundred or s ...
(Middle High German (–1500) with German) * ''Studien und Plaudereien im Vaterland'', Sigmon Martin Stern (German with English) * ''Caos del Triperuno'', Teofilo Folengo (Italian with Latin) * ''Niederländische Volkslieder'', Hoffmann von Fallersleben (German with Dutch) * ''A "San Francisco"'',
Salvatore Di Giacomo Salvatore Di Giacomo (12 March 1860 – 5 April 1934) was an Italian poet, songwriter, playwright and fascist, one of the signatories to the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals. Di Giacomo is credited as being one of those responsible for ...
(Italian with Neapolitan) * ''O' voto'', Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan) * ''De Latino sine Flexione'' & ''Principio de Permanentia'',
Giuseppe Peano Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much Mathematical notati ...
(1858–1932) (Latin with Latino sine Flexione) * ''Cappiddazzu paga tuttu—Nino Martoglio'',
Luigi Pirandello Luigi Pirandello (; ; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italians, Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his bold and ...
(Italian with Sicilian) * ''The International Auxiliary Language Esperanto'', George Cox (English with Esperanto) * ''Lusitania: canti popolari portoghesi'', Ettore Toci (Italian with French)


30,000th E-book

On 7 July 2015, the 30,000th book milestone was celebrated with a group of thirty texts. One was numbered 30,000: *''Graded literature readers - Fourth book'', editors:
Harry Pratt Judson Harry Pratt Judson (December 20, 1849 – March 4, 1927) was an American educator and historian who served as the second president of the University of Chicago from 1907 to 1923. Biography Judson was born at Jamestown, New York and educated at W ...
and Ida C. Bender, 1900


See also

*
List of digital library projects This is a list of digital library projects. See also * Bibliographic database * List of academic databases and search engines * List of online databases * List of online encyclopedias * List of open-access journals * List of search engines ...
*
Wikisource Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...


References


External links

*{{Official website Collaborative projects Crowdsourcing Distributed computing projects Human-based computation Internet properties established in 2000 Mass digitization Proofreading