Since its founding on October 1, 2000, Distributed Proofreaders has contributed over 37,000 public-domain e-books to Project Gutenberg’s vast free library. To celebrate our 19th anniversary, we look back at some of our accomplishments since our 18th anniversary.
Milestones
Distributed Proofreaders’ 37,000th title. In April 2019, Distributed Proofreaders posted its 37,000th unique title to Project Gutenberg, French Painting of the 19th Century in the National Gallery of Art. The celebratory blog post is here.
Project Gutenberg’s 60,000th title. In July 2019, Distributed Proofreaders contributed Project Gutenberg’s 60,000th title, The Living Animals of the World (volume 1). You can learn more about this milestone here.
Significant Projects
Many of the projects at Distributed Proofreaders have particular historical or literary significance. Recent examples:
Annali d’Italia. In May 2019, we posted to Project Gutenberg the eighth volume of the Italian history series Annali d’Italia dal principio dell’era volgare sino all’anno 1750 (Annals of Italy from the Beginning of the Common Era until the Year 1750), by the 18th-Century historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori. This important work — the first large-scale history of Italy — was initially published in Milan in 1743. Though Muratori died in 1750, the series was continued and updated for many years. The edition Distributed Proofreaders worked on was the fifth, published in Venice in 1847, nearly a century after Muratori’s death.
The Golden Bough. In September 2019, we posted the final volume of James George Frazer’s twelve-volume masterwork, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (3rd edition, 1915). Distributed Proofreaders volunteers prepared all twelve volumes. Frazer’s monumental study of comparative mythology and religion, first published as a two-volume work in 1890, had a huge influence not only on the field of social anthropology, but also on the literature and art of the time, and on the newly developing science of psychology.
Development
Site development has continued to flourish at Distributed Proofreaders, thanks to the hard work of our “squirrels” (the nickname for Distributed Proofreaders administrators), our developers, and the many volunteers who helped to design and test improvements such as:
- Updating the Distributed Proofreaders Walkthrough and translating it into French.
- Upgrading the software for both our wiki and our forums.
- Updating our official documentation for Post-Processors (the volunteers who wrangle the final proofed and formatted text into its final version for posting to Project Gutenberg).
- Continuing work on the Workbench tool for Post-Processors so they can more efficiently complete their final checks on a text.
- Making numerous other improvements to our interface, workflow, and tools to make it easier for volunteers to do their jobs and for projects to be posted more quickly.
In Memoriam
Distributed Proofreaders mourned the loss of three devoted members during the past year:
Halamus was a retired violin teacher and music publisher from Australia who joined Distributed Proofreaders in 2004. She was an extremely active Post-Processor and was responsible for 178 projects posted to Project Gutenberg. She also worked as a Post-Processing Verifier, and in that role she mentored new Post-Processors and shepherded 33 projects to completion. With her extensive musical background — she wrote and published many books of violin music and theory — Halamus was an important resource on our Music Team.
MarcD, from Belgium, was a longtime supporter of and liaison between Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg. He was the founder of Free Literature, an organization through which he produced many e-books for Project Gutenberg.
RSPIII joined Distributed Proofreaders in 2011 and during his time with us proofread and formatted 1,698 pages. He also post-processed eight books and had taken out several more to work on before he died. RSPIII was active in our community forums, and many of our volunteers remember him fondly.
Collaborative Projects
Project PHaEDRA. The Distributed Proofreaders collaboration with Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute on Project PHaEDRA is ongoing. This challenging project involves transcribing original notebooks created in the 19th and early 20th Centuries by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory, including early female astronomers and the famous Harvard Computers. One of the oldest handwritten notebooks in the collection, from 1848-49, has completed the proofreading rounds at Distributed Proofreaders and is currently making its way through the formatting rounds.
Mundaneum Project. In connection with an exhibition in March-April 2019 at the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium, entitled “Data Workers,” Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have been transcribing French and French-English texts from the Mundaneum’s archive. Our General Manager, Linda Hamilton, was interviewed on Skype for the exhibition. Additional Mundaneum texts in German, Spanish, and Italian are in preparation at Distributed Proofreaders.
Many thanks to all the Distributed Proofreaders volunteers, past and present, who have given us 19 years of “preserving history one page at a time.”
This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.
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I am thrilled to be part of this team. Thanks for that retrospective, Linda–it’s one I’m going to tell my family about.
Thanks! I’m always amazed at the breadth and quality of what we accomplish together. So proud of us!