Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

 

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit organization (since 2000) that maintains an electronic library of public domain materials that have been digitized (converted into electronic books or e-books) by volunteers. These materials are archived for download from the organization’s website (www.gutenberg.org).

The project got its start on July 4, 1971, when Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, began typing the US Declaration of Independence into the school’s computer system for distribution free of charge. He soon followed with the works of William Shakespeare and the Bible. Thus began Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library.

Over the next 20 years, Hart transcribed about 100 books before the spread of the Internet allowed for a vast international expansion in interest. The project grew to include hundreds and then thousands of volunteers around the world, and Hart took on more administrative duties, including fund-raising to maintain a website. The number of public works scanned (beginning in the 1990s) or transcribed steadily grew to 1,000 (1997), 10,000 (2003), 20,000 (2006) and 40,000 (2011).

In 2000, Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, a web-based program for parsing the difficult task of proofreading scanned texts for Project Gutenberg. In 2002 Distributed Proofreaders became part of Project Gutenberg. The ability to distribute the proofreading task among volunteer teams was reported in 2002 by Slashdot, a popular technology website. As word spread, hundreds of teams formed to scan and proofread new works. By 2009, roughly half of all Project Gutenberg books had been handled by using Distributed Proofreaders.

The vast majority of materials in the Project Gutenberg library are in English, although the addition of materials in other languages was started in 1997. In 2004, Project Gutenberg Europe and Distributed Proofreaders Europe were formed to facilitate the process of adding more non-English works. Project Gutenberg now includes works in more than 50 languages.

It is noteworthy that the copyright on any book published before 1923 expired no more than 75 years later, at which point it entered the public domain. Any work published between 1923 and 1977 retains its copyright for 95 years. The copyright on any work published in later years expires 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after publication in the case of a corporate work.

Update on the Social Science Research Network

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has grown substantially during the last 12 months. The SSRN eLibrary currently has 375,000 paper abstracts from over 175,000 authors and has received 60,000 new submissions during the year. The eLibrary recently delivered its 50 millionth full-text paper download. This is a significant milestone.

During the last year, SSRN changed its server architecture to improve the speed of searches, enhance overall stability and provide the infrastructure required to meet the continued growth. In recent tests, the average eLibrary search time has decreased from 4.5 seconds to less than 1 second. In addition, SSRN's Citereader project with ITX Corp. has extracted 7.4 million references, 4.7 million citations, and 7.7 million footnotes from 306,000 full text papers.

In 2012, SSRN plans to continue expanding its interdisciplinary growth in the social sciences and humanities by creating research networks in Sustainability, Innovation, Rhetoric, Anthropology and Hebrew.

About the Community Video Archive

The Internet Archive contains a section on Moving Images which is called “Community Video.” It was originally named “Open Source Video.” At present, this archive contains 149,895 items. Everyone is invited to view or upload videos to the Community collection.

Contributed by Archive users and community members, these videos are available for free download. Users can browse by title, author, collection, subject/keywords, language, date and creator. An RSS feed is also available. For a sample, see the “Earth Time Lapse View from Space” (5 minutes) which is also embeded below for ease of access.

IBM’s 100 Icons of Progress

"In the span of a century, IBM has evolved from a small business that made scales, time clocks and tabulating machines to a globally integrated enterprise with more than 400,000 employees and a strong vision for the future. The stories that have emerged throughout our history are complex tales of big risks, lessons learned and discoveries that have transformed the way we work and live. These 100 iconic moments—these Icons of Progress—demonstrate our faith in science, our pursuit of knowledge and our belief that together we can make the world work better." 

"In the late-1980s, IBM helped create a network of supercomputer centers dubbed NSFNET (the National Science Foundation Network), one of the first networks to use TCP/IP. The project essentially gave birth to the Internet—and business and life around the world changed forever. Before the Internet, scientists and researchers had to travel—often out of the country—for computing resources and to collaborate on major projects. By the early 1980s, an early Internet had begun to emerge: a primitive, regional telecommunications network linking several national laboratories and supercomputing centers that could be accessed only by trained experts. It was complicated, unfriendly and slow. But it was an important first step to the worldwide establishment of the Internet."

About the past, present and future of the Internet

It's the year 2000, and the Internet "is making the world a very different place for us," says Canadian Internet expert Jim Carroll. In this January 23, 2000 episode of Mansbridge One on One, Peter Mansbridge interviews Carroll about the past, present and future of the net. The typically optimistic Carroll does express a few fears. He worries the current Internet business boom could soon crash in a big way. "There's something massive going on here, but it doesn't mean we need to throw out our collective sanity." View the interview at CBC Digital Archives. Also read about current perspectives in Jim Carroll's regular column in CAmagazine online.

About Web 2.0 and Social Media

Recently, corporate Internet communication strategies have begun to include Web 2.0 technologies and applications, as well as social media tools, because they are rapidly changing the way companies conduct business and communicate business performance. Although the term "social media" is widely used, there are different points of view about what it actually means. Put simply, the Internet of the 1990s was about static, information-based content and a clear separation between content provider and end user. Web 2.0 and social media offer richer content based on collaboration and information sharing, encouraging end users to be more interactive with the content they access and more proactive about producing their own Web content. For an in-depth review, refer to the Trebor Scholz presentations, “How the Social Web Came to Be (part 1),” covering the years from 1945 to 2001, and “How the Social Web Came to Be (part 2),” covering the period from 2002 to 2007. Also refer to the June 2010 discussion draft "Practical Guidance for Managing Web 2.0 and Social Media" which is available on the CICA website as part of the research project "Using the Internet in Corporate Reporting."

CICA establishes Digital Archives Advisory Committee

The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) has established a Digital Archives Advisory Committee (DAAC). DAAC comprises seven members representing the academic community (2), public accounting firms (2) and CICA alumni (3). Staff liaison is provided by the CICA Information Services Officer.

The committee will provide leadership in identifying areas where digital archives are needed, explore and recommend potential accounting history initiatives, and provide advice on establishing a potential joint venture with a Canadian university to host and maintain the CICA digital archives that would be accessible by interested parties over the Internet.

It is anticipated that DAAC will meet two or three times a year in Toronto with the first meeting being scheduled for October 23, 2009. The objective of this blog is to communicate with interested parties about DAAC's deliberations and to disseminate information on digital archives of interest to Chartered Accountants both in Canada and internationally.