April 23, 2010

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The Beaver Bulletin / Le Bulletin du castor


DP Canada: Recycling Dead Trees into Living Text
DP Canada: Nous recyclons les arbres morts pour en faire des textes vivants


Volume 3, Issue #62--April 23, 2010
(Full listing of previous issues is available at DPC Newsletters)


Contents

Memoriams for Vasa aka Michael Lockey

Vasa, as many of you know, passed away on April 10, 2010. He will be sadly and sincerely missed by the DP community. He was a tireless fighter for getting books into the Public Domain. He started with DP-Int in August 2003, DP-Europe in December 2003 and with DPC in January 2008. Vasa had been in a long-term care home for the past couple of years.

His funeral was April 16, 2010, and Simple Simon attended to represent the DP community. We thank him.

For those who wish to learn a little more about Vasa or to add their own comments, DP-Int has started a: wikipage There is also a DP-Int discussion thread and a DPC discussion thread.

DPC has plans to do a text-only version of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne who died in 1956; the illustrator did not die until 1976 so, much as we would love to have those illustrations, they are not yet in Canada's public domain. Winnie-the-Pooh was a book that Vasa wanted to do. We'll let you know when the book is ready for proofing.


A Tribute to Vasa from Simple Simon

"When I joined DP-INT in August 2006, all bright-eyed and innocent, I made all the customary mistakes and false steps. One of the first members to step up to mentor me was this fella called Vasa. A bit crusty in manner, but full of good information and unbelievable enthusiasm for books and reading. He gave me good advice on qualifying for P3, and held my hand through the early agonies of PPing.

As is my customary approach, I sailed in where angels wouldn't even look--taking on PP projects full of complexity, where experienced PPers had run away screaming (one project had been returned to the pool by 5 different PPers). Vasa helped me deal with PPV feedback that was "tough but fair", but far from motivating for one still trying for DU status. Together, we worked out a checklist of steps that is still the basis of my PPing style.

And Michael also re-awakened my interest in all books, not just the kind I like to read. It's not too facile to say that his encouragement has been central to my resolve to get DPC off the ground and flourishing. He was also trying to design a "dp-50" site to take advantage of Canada's copyright laws--it's just that coachmike and I got to the finish line first--as we now know his health was not the best.

I never met Michael Lockey in life, just hundreds of times on the various DP sites where he contributed, and in the emails we exchanged. But, from my discussions with his friends and family at the funeral, I learned that he was a man of eclectic interests, with a book collection approaching 50,000, a love of off-beat causes, and an abiding love for the world and everything in it.

Pax vobiscum, Vasa."

Simple Simon


Warm welcome for our DP-Int/US friends and cousins

The past couple of days have seen an increase in attendance by our DP-Int/US friends and cousins; we even gained some new members. On Monday, April 19, their server was down for a planned replacement of the hard drives. Unfortunately--for DP-Int--everything did not go according to plan. The server continued to have problems for over 24 hours. But, friendly people that DPCers are, we invited them to come here and get their DP "fix". We helped out last year (late February 2009) when DP-Int's server was down for several days.

Quite a few DPers are members of both sites and so are always popping back and forth. DPers belong to a very caring community; we're all family or friends and we help each other out all the time.


Special Requests

Thanks to all CPs and PMs

With foreknowledge that there was to be downtime at DP-Int/US and a subsequent influx of DP-Int/US denizens, our CPers/PMs got more projects uploaded for the P1 queue. Thank you to all who worked to get your projects ready much earlier than you'd probably planned.

Any available PPers?

There are many available projects for PPers (with more every day)--there are over 90 projects waiting for PPers--the formatters have been busy.

Lots of choices depending on what you like:

  • easy, average, hard;
  • history, biography, fiction, humour (or is that "humor" :wink:), folklore, periodicals, science, military and other genres;
  • most are in English, but there are several in Portuguese, one in German, one English with French and one is Spanish;
  • the projects range in size from about 25 pages to over 800;
  • a number of them have illustrations.


Editorial

Simon is slowly recovering though I'm not sure if his "nurse" has yet given him permission to go back to being our "full time" site admin. He does advise that he's working on getting his backlog caught up.

* * * * *

Membership--We're looking good and should be able to welcome our 1,000th member by late summer or early fall ... or maybe even sooner. As an FYI, although DPC's official launch date is December 1, 2007, our first two members--DPCanada and Simple Simon--signed up August 2 & 3, 2007 respectively. Think we can make 1,000 before then? After all, we only need 20 or so more people to register.

So, what do you think we should do in celebration?

* * * * *

National Volunteer Week--We're just finishing up another annual Volunteer Week. Did you know that all of the DP community is made up of volunteers? All monies that are donated go towards hardware and other administrative costs; no one, not even our beavers (aka DPC squirrels) are paid.

We should be giving ourselves a round of applause for all our hard work in preparing and uploading public domain ebooks to the Project Gutenberg sites. All of us: CPers, PMs, proofers, foofers, PPers, PPVers, site admin personnel, squirrels/beavers,... all deserve a warm and well-deserved "thank you".

As well, an extra special thank you to the squirrels and beavers who keep the sites up and running; without them, we wouldn't be able to get our daily DP "fix".

Our especial thanks to Simple Simon and coachmike for founding DPC to give us a "home" so that we can tackle books that are PD in Canada. And thanks as well to Dr. Mark Akrigg for starting PGCanada where we can post those same books.

You can add your comments and/or kudos at Volunteer Week.

* * * * *

Display Site--As mentioned in the Simon Says... for February 26, Simon has set up a forum to discuss the various aspects of the Display Site. Have you seen it yet? What do you think? We want to know.

There have been a few ideas put forward which Simon has gratefully responded to. Are there more ideas or comments?

* * * * *

Calling all Proofers--We have an ongoing need for getting projects into the formatting rounds. Maybe all proofers--especially P3s--could commit to doing a few more pages every week ... F1s don't have many projects to choose from and what they get are quickly dealt with. Foofers can help with proofing, too; especially if you are looking for a change of pace.

* * * * *

PLEASE NOTE--Update--The "new" FAQs and non-English Guidelines that you can access through the FAQ Central page either have been or are being revised to be truly DPC versions.

* * * * *

Formatting Guidelines--Simon advises that he hopes to get these updated and released by mid-May. At least, he's certainly going to try. Once that's done, we'll "retire" the older versions of ALL guidelines that are on our site--they cause too much confusion.

* * * * *

Server and site issues--There's still the odd server problem that has continued, but hopefully those will be cleared up once the site code is upgraded. See below for comments about the site code update.

* * * * *

ÜberProjects--see the regular updates below. There's a good possibility that several more of our Chronicles will be posted soon.


Revisions to Guidelines, FAQs and the DPC site code

Guideline Differences--Once we get our Proofreading and Formatting Guidelines updated to go along with our upcoming site code upgrade, we intend to produce a wikipage with the differences. We're working on the Guidelines updates at this time and we hope to produce the "differences" page shortly thereafter.

* * * * *

Guidelines Summaries--IonaV, with the kind assistance of Long Green (aka Mama Beth), is updating the Proofreading and Formatting Guidelines Summaries. They are a little out of date considering that some of the rules noted in the summaries are TOTALLY different from what we do!! <<oops>>

* * * * *

Upgraded DPC site code--There have been further delays so we won't see it for some time yet ... but that's life, isn't it. Comments from a recent post (April 21) by Simple Simon: 

 We will "synchronize" our site code with that of DP-INT, but it's proving to be more complicated than we thought. 
 
 All current features of DP-INT, including WordCheck, will be implemented, except possibly a few items that would 
 conflict with the fundamental security design of the DPC servers. (We use VMWare, and a series of "virtual machines" 
 to accomplish our purposes, and this ultra-modern approach requires us to do some tasks in a specific way). 
 
 The plan has been to depend solely on DP-INT and its Squirrels/Developers to keep the site code updated from 
 "synchronization" onwards. But we may have to reconsider this approach. 
 
 We are carefully watching the direction in which site development may go, and all the other proposals out there on 
 the subject of site-redesign. 
 
 These complications, together with our extremely scarce developer resources, are delaying "synchronization" severely.


ÜberProject #1: Chronicles of Canada

There continue to be lots of spaces for volunteers to PM, PP and even CP. To see the current status of the volumes, check out the ÜberProject wiki page for The Chronicles of Canada here: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/The_Chronicles_of_Canada.

  • De2164 and IonaV are prepping the rest of the volumes. Sufficient PMs have volunteered to handle all remaining volumes--we just need PPers, but the volumes can be picked up from the PP pool when they have completed the rounds unless there is a volume that a PPer really wants to do--in that case let the PM know sooner rather than later.
  • We've arranged to get "mint condition" copies of the full set and so will be able to get good scans of all the maps and illustrations as well as picking up missing pages (if any). Thank you to hugger1935 for the use of the books.
  • Volumes 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 25, 31 and 32 are available for, in or completed Post-Processing. There are several in New Project being prepared for the P1: Waiting queue with one or two yet to be prepped.
  • PP standards have been set and the books do not have anything extremely difficult at all. Check the Chronicles wiki page for the PP standards. Some of the standards for PPing have been updated.
  • Volumes 13, 17 and 24 are being done at DP-Int since the authors of these volumes are out of DPC's copyright purview. They will be posted to PG-Int in due time. For those that are interested, Volumes 17 & 24 are in the P3 waiting queue while Volume 13 is sitting in F2: Waiting.
  • Nine volumes have been posted to PGC and/or PG-International:
    • Volume 1: The Dawn of Canadian History, A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada,
    • Volume 2: The Mariner of St Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier,
    • Volume 3: The Founder of New France, A Chronicle of Champlain,
    • Volume 5: The Seigneurs of old Canada: A Chronicle of New World Feudalism,
    • Volume 8: The Great Fortress: A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760,
    • Volume 12: The Father of British Canada, A Chronicle of Carleton,
    • Volune 18: The 'Adventures of England on Hudson Bay', A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North,
    • Volume 20: Adventurers of the Far North, A Chronicle of the Arctic Seas,
    • Volume 27: The Winning of Popular Government: A Ahronicle of the Union of 1841, and
    • Volume 29: The Day of Sir John MacDonald, A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Dominion.


ÜberProject #2: Jesuit Relations

Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France; 1610-1791

Vol. 65: Lower Canada, Mississippi Valley, 1696-1702, is in post processing. Simon advises that he has started on the PPing of this volume and says that it will probably be a slow task. There are experienced PPers of old French and Latin whom I'm sure that he will be using as resources. Wish him "good luck".

Vol. 66: Illinois, Louisiana, Iroquois, Lower Canada, 1702-1712, is now in post processing.

Vol. 67: Lower Canada, Abenakis, Louisiana; 1716- 1727 is in P3: Available. Lots of "fun" with strange characters, old style French spellings and accents, bits and pieces of other languages.

Vol. 68: Lower Canada, Crees, Louisiana; 1720-1736 is in P3: Available. Again, lots of "fun" with strange characters, old style French spellings and accents, bits and pieces of other languages.

Vol. 69: All Missions; 1710-1756 is in P1: Available. More of the same strange characters with Latin as well as old French spellings and English.

A set of standards has been determined and added to the Project Comments. An ÜberProject wiki page for Jesuit Relations has been created. It includes the basic instructions for proofing and formatting.


ÜberProject #3: Governor General's Award Books

Warmheart has created an ÜberProject page for this uberproject. The page looks very good and has lots of links. You can see the details of what she has completed to date here: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/Governor_General%27s_Literary_Awards Check it out, you might find something interesting there....

There are only a couple of books that are available since many of the authors are still alive--ah, well, we'll get them eventually. :)


ÜberProject #4: Periodicals

Graham's Magazine is the first part of our ongoing periodicals ÜberProject. Eleven of the first year's volumes have been posted to PG. The last issue is in post-processing. The second year has started now with four in the proofing or formatting rounds, one waiting and one in post-processing. Simon says that more are coming.

* * * * *

Our Young Folks, An illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls; Issued monthly; Publication Dates: January 1865 thru October 1873 when it merged with St. Nicholas.

Volume 1: Ten issues are in PP. Two volumes have been posted to Project Gutenberg.

Volume 2: Four issues are undergoing proofing or formatting; five are in P1: Waiting and there are several more in prep.

Volume 3: Warmheart has started to prep the third volume.

Warmheart's wikipage for the Periodical can be found through this link: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/Our_Young_Folks .

* * * * *

Scientific American--these are very early issues, too--from 1846. The first issue has now been posted. Simon has more being prepped for proofing.

We've started a wiki page for it: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/Periodicals/Scientific_American.

* * * * *

The Maple Leaf--This is a Canadian juvenile periodical published between 1852 and 1854. Susan and IonaV are going to share the duties of PMing. Iona is handling the prep, Susan has downloaded the scans and will do the PPing. They are hoping to get it into the rounds within the next week or so.

A wikipage has been created: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/The_Maple_Leaf

* * * * *

Remember, these aren't the only periodicals that we can do--there are lots of others out there and some that are very different than "Graham's". Is there one that you'd like to do? Suggestions for favourite OLD periodicals are always welcome, but they must meet 3 criteria:

  1. published before 1860 to avoid the need for copyright checking
  2. good quality scans of a reasonable number of issues (preferably in whole volumes=a year)
  3. interesting content, out of the ordinary


ÜberProject #5: Works by Charles Dickens

Simple Simon and IonaV are Dickens fans. We know that there are many more out there. Although there are some of Dickens' works on the other PG sites, some of it is text only. We've got early editions of those books with illustrations as well as stories that have not yet been posted. As well, there are letters and essays and ...

More details and an ÜberProject wiki page to come.


ÜberProject #6: John Graves Simcoe

John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, and military leader of Canada, and one of the true Canadian "Fathers of Confederation". This is NOT dull history either.

Projects about or by Simcoe in proofing and/or formatting rounds: 1; post-processing: 1. Three have been posted to PGC.

Simon is soliciting other material by or about Simcoe--do you know of any?


ÜberProject #7: Gilbert (George) Murray

Gilbert Murray lived from 1866-1957. He was quite a prolific writer with some 90 odd titles to his name with 32 of them being translations of Greek dramas.

Status of these projects--post processing: 2; proofing/foofing: 5; P1: Waiting: 0; in prep: 2+.

Miscia has created a wikipage which will be a work in progress naturally: http://www.pgdpcanada.net/wiki/index.php/Gilbert_%28George%29_Murray_%281866-1957%29


ÜberProject #8: Art Latcham Magic Collection

This new ÜberProject should be launched within the next few weeks--Simon had a great progress meeting on April 21, and the presentation to the Stouffville Library Board is on May 8.

All "magic" lovers should get ready. If you know of anyone who likes magic and who are not members of DPC, be sure to let them know about this upcoming ÜberProject.

And if you want to be really involved with the project in some way: prepping, PMing, PPing, managing the ÜberProject wikipage or any of the tasks listed in the Simon Says... article above, just send Simon a PM and let him know.


We Grow Every Day

We are now up to 880 members. Welcome to all new members; I hope you find some projects that you will enjoy doing. Many of our members are also members of DP-Int/US and/or DP Europe--we welcome them and thank them for all their continued support and interest in DPC. (Numbers are accurate up to "press" time.)

New
April 2010 23
2010 Q1 62
2009 total 321
2008 total 235
2007 total 239
Total to date 880


Milestones

We are going to use this space to "celebrate" notable milestones achieved by a member, team, group or project. For example, we'll report when a member completes 5,000 pages in any one round; then we'll let you know when they've done 10,000 pages and so on.

The "team" numbers are the cumulative totals for each round for each member while they are members of a particular team. So that's why, the team pages go up whenever a team member's totals increase. Another reason to join a team or two....

Completed 65,000 pages in a round:

  • no one at present...

Completed 60,000 pages in a round:

  • Foofers' Corner in F2 NEW!!!

Completed 55,000 pages in a round:

  • no one at present...

Completed 50,000 pages in a round:

  • no one at present...

Completed 45,000 pages in a round:

  • uwe-joachim in F2

Completed 40,000 pages in a round:

  • no one at present...

Completed 35,000 pages in a round:

  • Team USA in P3

Completed 30,000 pages in a round:

  • rolands in P3

Completed 25,000 pages in a round:

  • Ex-Pats in F2
  • P3 Pros in P3 NEW!!!
  • Team Canada in P1

Completed 20,000 pages in a round:

  • Foofers' Corner in F1
  • LOTE Flotes my Bote in F2
  • Team Canada in P2

Completed 15,000 pages in a round:

  • P2 Expediters in P3

Completed 10,000 pages in a round:

  • Bibi in P3
  • De2164 in F1
  • hugger1935 in F1
  • rcool in P1 and P2
  • Scribe in F2
  • snowseraph in P2
  • stygiania in P3
  • Team Canada in P3 and F1
  • Team German in F2
  • Team USA in P2 and F2 NEW!!!

Completed 5,000 pages in a round:

  • Adair in F1 and F2
  • Antigony in F1
  • cmspence in F2
  • Daniel G in P1
  • Drama Team in P2 and P3
  • gmiller in P2
  • goofball in P1
  • hugger1935 in P1, P2, P3 and F2
  • Infomaniacs in P2 and P3
  • Marmaduke in P3
  • mcbax in P3
  • Miscia in P3
  • Pippin in F1
  • RCEberwein in F1
  • snowseraph in P1
  • stygiania in F2
  • supo88 in P2
  • Warmheart in P2 and F1
  • yajeulb in F1
  • Drama Team in P1, P2 and P3 NEW!!!
  • DPing with Cats in P1, P2 and F1
  • Foofers' Corner in P2 and P3
  • Infomaniacs in P2 and P3
  • P2 Expediters in P2 and F2
  • P3 Pros in F2
  • Team British Columbia in P1, P2, P3 and F2NEW!!!
  • Team Canada in F2 NEW!!!
  • Team français in P3
  • Team German in P3 and F1
  • Team Smoothy (aka 'Smoothies') in P2
  • Team UK in P1 and P2
  • Team USA in P1 and F1
  • Weather Reports in F2

And how many pages have been done in each of the rounds? Naturally, F2 will be at the bottom since they are the last round that gets the projects before PPing and P1 will be on top since they get to start all the projects. <grin> Another consideration is that P3 or F2 stats may be slightly smaller if the PM/PPer has skipped his/her/their project through either one or both of those rounds. So let's see where each round was at the end of March:

  • P1 completed over 145,000 pages
  • P2 completed over 136,000 pages
  • P3 completed over 118,000 pages
  • F1 completed over 119,000 pages
  • F2 completed over 113,000 pages

Great work, people!!!


Proofing & Formatting Stats

All rounds have met and exceeded their targets for April--and we still have a week to go before the end of the month. Way to go, people!!! I wonder what the final totals will be?...

Round P1 P2 P3 F1 F2
April target3,3003,3003,0003,3003,000
*April to date6,1354,8043,7394,2973,726
April to date %185.91%145.58%124.63%130.21%124.20%

*Numbers accurate to "press" time.

For more statistics and related links go to: Statistics Central.


Books In Process And/or Posted To PG Canada or PG-International

At press time, we had 338 Gold Star books posted to PGC or PG-Int (with 6 in PPV). Fantastic work, everyone!!

There are currently 345 Silver Star projects in post processing (with 95 waiting for PPers) and 137 Bronze Star projects which are currently undergoing proofing or formatting; there are another 31 waiting in the queue. For more details about the posted and/or active projects, please see the listings on the DPC Welcome page.


User Team Talk

Have you checked out our user teams? To check out the teams or to join one go to: User Teams. The Team threads are located under Proofing Team Talk. Is there a team that you'd like to see? You can create a team from the link on the User Teams page--you might be surprised by who shows up to join you.

We have 28 teams; more are always welcome.


Possible Future Articles

This is YOUR newsletter: yes, there are forum posts and user team posts, but is there something that you want to tell the whole DPC community? You are allowed to brag here. You can also be anonymous if you choose ... we won't tell.

  • Tips or Hints: for those people who do/did a lot of proofing and/or formatting on DP-Int/US &/or DP-Eur, do you have any tips or "rules" that you follow to help yourself while you proof or format? Even a re-wording of a guideline that helps you remember how to do something specific.
  • Tell us why you joined DPC.
  • Quotable Quotes: have you seen a thought-provoking quote that is relevant to the DP Community while you were doing your proofing that you just had to pass on?...
  • The most interesting, outrageous, or strangest line you proofed: before it was proofed (if that was the outrageous or strange part) and what it was after proofing (please do not submit obscene language, it will not be published).
  • New projects: PMs is there a series of books or books by a very prolific author that you'd like to do?--let us know so that we can help pass the word to the proofers so they'll be there to jump in and work on them.
  • Kudos, Bouquets & Compliments: are there any DPers that you would like to give special thanks and/or recognition to: a mentor who gave you lots of guidance, a PPer that made your project into a very wonderful looking book for posting to PG, a CPer or image/text preparer who went the extra little bit to provide you with clean scans, well OCR'd text, or good illustrations for your project, another DPer who made you feel really welcome or provided you with some good advice or....
  • "Guest articles" by anyone and everyone who wishes to....
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