Friday, October 14, 2005

Transcribing Books

Google's and the Archive's and all of the other groups' attempts to scan a bunch of books is a wonderful idea.

For those of us who feel left out of these Alexandrian projects, there are a few options: volunteer to help Project Gutenberg (or other similar group), start emailing scans of your books to Google (ha ha), or do something new.

Gather a trusted group of people who own a particular edition of a non-digitized book. Set up a writing project at one of the new collaborative wikis or word processor web apps or create your own. Take turns entering sentences according to some well-defined rules. If the writing group is large enough, the endeavour could be completed in a not unreasonable amount of time.

A perfect group of people for this project would be a gaggle of library workers. However, it's an odd input mechanism and would need some kind of pay-off to catch on. Any ideas?

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