Distributed Proofreading (Project Gutenberg)
Posted to Check it out!
Before 2000, public domain books were largely contributed to Project Gutenberg by individuals lovingly entering the contents of each book into a computer manually. This was both time-consuming and delayed progress because the workload was not effectively distributed. When Charles Franks came up with a different approach, in late 2000, Project Gutenberg suddenly had a large, accurate, steady stream of new books coming in to its library. What changed?
Digital Proofreading decided to tackle the problem with technology and developed a web-based proofreaders tool which lets a volunteer see both the scanned page and the OCR'd text to better enable them to carefully proofread the contents page-by page. Through large-scale scanning and OCR, an effective web interface, and breaking proofreading down into 1-page work units, Digital Proofreading has contributed morethan 6,500 books to Project Gutenberg since the year 2000. That's over 5,000,000 proofread pages in a little over 4 years!
Why not check out their site and proofread a couple pages? It's for a great cause (preserving the books in digital format) and will only take a couple minutes of your time... unless you get hooked.
