ERPANET Case Study: Project Gutenberg | Page 5

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 existence and indeed any new eBooks created, are still accessible far into the future.
End Notes:
(1) ERPANET is a European Commission funded project (IST-2001-32706). See www.erpanet.org for more details and available products. (2) Chapters 2 and 3 are taken from 'Cross-sectoral Development of Digital Preservation Strategies: ERPANET and the Expansion of Knowledge', given at Preservation of Electronic Records. New Knowledge and Decision-making, Symposium 2003. (3) The Charter is ERPANET's statement on the principles of digital preservation. It has been drafted