Distributed Proofreaders
From Free net encyclopedia
Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a project to support the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg. Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by the project managers and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Unfortunately, OCR software is presently far from perfect, and often a large number of errors appear in the resulting text. To deal with this, individual pages are made available to volunteers via a web-based interface to proofread, displaying the original page's image and the recognized text side-by-side. This effectively distributes the time-consuming error correction process, analogously to distributed computing.
Each page goes through two rounds of user proofreading and two rounds of user formatting, followed by post-processing, where the book is prepared for uploading to Project Gutenberg. The editing process is similar to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which predates it by several years but is focused on the narrower topic of Christian texts.
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002. In October 2004, Distributed Proofreaders posted their 5,000th book to Project Gutenberg; about 300 new books were being finished each month. As of March 2006 the 8,200 DP-contributed books comprised more than 40% of the 18,500+ books in Project Gutenberg.
Among other projects, Distributed Proofreaders is currently working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the volumes of which will be available on Project Gutenberg as they are finished.
In January 2004, DP Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko. This site has the ability to process text in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Books proofread are centered mainly on European culture, with a large proportion of non-English texts. As of March 2006, DP Europe had produced 270 books.