ERPANET Case Study: Project Gutenberg | Page 5

text version. Additional versions in other formats will be named
accordingly but with different file extensions (e.g., html, pdf, xml).
Each eBook has its own subdirectory that contains all versions of the
eBook.
Project Gutenberg have volunteers representing a wide range of sectors
(cultural heritage, government and higher education). Through these
affiliations, they keep up to date with digital preservation developments.
Project Gutenberg staff have ties with many organisational leaders and
informal collaborations on best practices are common.
Access
The eBooks are catalogued by Project Gutenberg volunteers to include
the author, the author's dates of birth & death, language, eBook number,
and the Library of Congress classification to enhance online searching
capabilities. As the publications that Project Gutenberg aims to make
accessible are already in the public domain, restricting access is not
really an issue. Project Gutenberg is mirrored in over thirty sites around
the world. As such, they cannot accurately estimate the number of

downloads that take place across all of the mirrored sites, but state that
the equivalent of 1 million eBooks are downloaded each month from
the main central server (16). In an effort to increase accessibility by
non-English users, eBooks can be generated and submitted in any
language.
Project Gutenberg uses Dublin Core to describe their electronic
resources to enable resource discovery.
Compliance Monitoring
There are no external requirements that Project Gutenberg must meet.
However, Distributed Proof-readers (17) work to edit and ensure that
the eBook content is as accurate as possible. The eBook goes through
two rounds of proofreading where it may be examined by hundreds of
volunteers. Once the eBook has been proofread, it goes to the
post-processing stage. 'The ultimate goal of post-processing is to create
a plain text eBook with consistent formatting throughout, which
contains as few errors as possible, and which accurately reflects the
intentions of the author' (18). Project Gutenberg citations - for example
in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)- appear as their own
editions and, as such, do not comply with any particular paper edition.
In some cases Project Gutenberg editions are listed as the only edition
in existence. Project Gutenberg makes every effort to ensure that they
comply with U.S. copyright laws and encourages all volunteers to
verify that materials proposed for digitisation are in the public domain.
Guidance and advice on undertaking this research is provided on the
project website. However, the Project Gutenberg team are ultimately
responsible for verifying public domain status and require that a copy
of the title page be submitted for each proposed publication to assist in
this process.
Digital Preservation Costs
A registered charity, Project Gutenberg relies on donations to pay their
few dedicated staff members and for operational costs. Nearly 100 per
cent of the operational budget is focused on preservation. In terms of
storage costs, the project founder believes that as disk drives become

larger and cheaper, the price of putting eBooks on computers will
become negligible (19).
Future Outlook
Project Gutenberg has already been implemented in Australia and
Europe. Project Gutenberg of Canada is being founded in the near
future. Project Gutenberg also hopes "to also create such projects in
Africa, Asia, and other regions. In particular, they hope to create
projects by which e-books can reach the masses via digital radio links
to solar-powered PDAs. In addition, Project Gutenberg will be adding
more multimedia e-books: paintings, sculptures, music, audio e-books,
movies, etc., along with a wider variety of text formats." (20)
Project Gutenberg will continue digitising literary works and aim to
offer over 10,000,000 eBooks in over 100 languages by the time they
celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2021. Project Gutenberg aim to
enable the migration on request of their plain text files. This would
mean that the plain text version could be generated in any type of file
requested on the fly. This is currently in test mode. Project Gutenberg
is also investigating creating the eBooks as born XML to allow easier
creation of other formats on demand (21).
Chapter 7
: Conclusions
As the first and largest collection of eBooks, Project Gutenberg has
been preserving electronic publications and making them accessible for
over thirty years. By adhering to strict guidelines regarding the format
of the eBook (plain text) for access and readability, Project Gutenberg
has also ensured that their electronic resources can be preserved and
migrated easily to other formats as needed. By uploading the eBooks to
two main servers and by mirroring the Project Gutenberg database on
sites around the world they ensure that backup versions of the eBooks
are readily available if necessary. This multi-distributed approach is
similar to the preservation strategy Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe
(LOCKSS) that is gaining worldwide interest. The combination of open

formats and the proliferation of copies downloaded around the world
should ensure that Project Gutenberg eBooks currently in