Pt2 Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter 17th September 2003

The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter 17th September 2003
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971

Part 2

In this week's Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter:

1) Editorial
2) News
   Distributed Proofreaders Update
   Radio Gutenberg Update
3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features
   Notes from Posted
4) Mailing list information


Editorial

Hello,

Another small special this week looking at the multi-media aspects of
PG. The idea for this newsletter came from a discussion on one of our
volunteer lists. 'Let's do the movies' they said. The first choice -
well, Gali has kindly supplied a feature below. Mike Eschman also
gives us his reasons for starting Radio Gutenberg, and Greg Newby,
along with his plea for more help with music, gives us an update on
what donations are for when it comes to Project Gutenberg.

Happy reading,

Alice

send email to the newsletter editor at: news@xxxxxxxxx

Founding editor: Michael Hart hart@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Newsletter editor: Alice Wood news@xxxxxxxxx
Project Gutenberg CEO: Greg Newby gbnewby@xxxxxxxxx

Project Gutenberg website: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/
Project Gutenberg Newsletter website: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/newsletter
Radio Gutenberg: http://www.radio-gutenberg.com
Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net
Newsletter and mailing list subscriptions: 
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/subs.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------

============= [ SUBMIT A NEW EBOOK FOR COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE ]==============

If you have a book you would like to confirm is in the public domain in
the US, and therefore suitable for Project Gutenberg, please do the
following:

1. Check whether we have the eBook already.  Look in
        http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/GUTINDEX.ALL
which is updated weekly.  (The searchable catalog at
http://www.gutenberg.net  lags behind by several months)

2. Check the "in progress" list to see whether someone is already
working on the eBook.  Sometimes, books are listed as in progress for
years - if so, email David Price (his address is on the list) to ask
for contact information for the person working on the book.  The "in
progress" list:
        http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html

3. If the book seems to be a good candidate (pre-1923 publication
date, or 1923-1988 published in the US without a copyright notice),
submit scans of the title page and verso page (even if the verso is
blank) to:
        http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html

You'll hear back within a few days.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

2) News and Comment

Donations update from Greg Newby

Project Gutenberg runs on volunteer power.  To support our
many thousands of active volunteers, we rely on donations from
individuals and organizations.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was formed
in 2001, in order to be the organizational home to the Project
Gutenberg effort.  Dr. Greg Newby is the CEO, with Dr. Doug Bowman
and Dr. Harry Hilton as Directors.  All are volunteers.  Paid
employees of PGLAF are Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg,
Ben Stone (Michael's administrative assistant), and T. and Anne
Wingate (CTO and office managers).  Only Michael is full-time, the others
are part-time.

In addition to salaries and associated taxes and expenses,
other expenses to PGLAF include some recent scanner purchases
(we own two Fujitsu page scanners, and a large-format flatbed),
supplies for our CD/DVD giveaway, and some travel.  For example,
PGLAF paid for Greg Newby and DP founder Charles Franks to present
their paper, "Distributed Proofreading," at the Joint Conference
on Digital Libraries in Houston in May.

One of the biggest single ongoing expenses is registering as
a charity in all 50 states.  This keeps Anne Wingate busy,
and costs about $5000/year in registration fees.  We also pay
our CPA several thousand per year to prepare our audit and maintain
compliance with federal and state laws.

PGLAF has 501(c)(3) status from the US IRS, which designates it
a charitable not-for-profit.  This means that donations are tax
deductible to the extent permitted by law, and we are able to
apply for funding restricted to not-for-profits.   For continued
501(c)(3) status, PGLAF undergoes a yearly audit (the 2002-03
audit is being prepared now), and needs to maintain a proper
balance of small donations to large.

Donations to PGLAF arrive via PayPal, check, credit card, and
occasional larger gifts or grants.  PayPal donations are typically
$10-$100.  We get 10-20 per month.  Donations by check range from quite
small (just a few dollars) to several hundred dollars, again
with about 10-20 per month arriving.  In some cases, people have
used their workplace to make donations, including regular donations,
via the United Way or other institutions.  We also get a direct
bank deposit from NetworkForGood, reflecting $100-200/month in
credit card donations (until this month, we did not get date about
how many donations this reflected -- it's 5-10, so far).  Added together,
a typical month brings in anywhere from $800-$3000 in donations
of under $500, from 20-50 individuals.  This includes royalty
payments for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark (per our
"small print" in each eBook).

Complete details on donation methods are in our Donation HOWTO.
        Visit http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg

PGLAF also receives larger donations.  So far in 2003, we
received two donations of $10,000 (one from an individual, the
other from a company), and a grant of $25,000 from a foundation.
Most donations come with no strings attached (there are limitations
from the IRS on how the money may be spent, or bargained for),
but the foundation grant included a stipulation that about $2500
would be spent on an evaluation study.

PGLAF is always interested in working with potential donors, or
in approaching sources such as charitable foundations or government
agencies for funding.  Email Greg Newby <gbnewby@xxxxxxxxx or
one of our mailing lists to talk about possibilities.  In addition,
we are open to suggestions on good things to spend our money on.
Generally, we want to get the most possible value from our budget,
and are primarily interested in investing in our volunteers to
enhance eBook production.

Greg Newby
                    -------------------

Call to arms - The Gutenberg Bible

Guess what? My wife thinks PG has the Gutenberg Bible
online. We don't.

This _LARGE_ project will require an army of
volunteers (including me) who are willing to surf to
http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/default.asp and save the
images onto their hard-drives manually, then another
army to convert the color files to B&W so that another
army (of one) can train Abbyy Finereader to recognize
it so that we don't have to type it in (although we
_WILL_ if we have to). Then it will hit DP and go
through proofing.

An immense project but one well worth doing. They said
we couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't, but we will.  

Won't we?

Contact garvint@xxxxxxxxx to enlist. There are no 4Fs
in _this_ army.

Ted Garvin
                    -------------------

Other news items this week

Project Gutenberg is interested digitized music in all forms.  We
have a large-format scanner suitable for sheet music, and have
released musical scores in Finale and MusicXML formats.  We would
welcome MIDI, Lilypond, and other formats, as well.  Visit:
        http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/music
for our current sheet music offerings and files available for
processing.  Contemporary scores (with copyright permission) and
older musical plays would also be of interest.  As for all 
Project Gutenberg items, the first step is to get copyright
clearance (http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html).

-----------------------------

New York is Book Country is being held this week. A  street market is
happening on Sunday 21st Sept in 5th Avenue between 11am - 5pm. Juliet
sutherland is planning on attending to purchase lots and lots of juicy
materials to send PG's way. She would like to hear from you if you
are able to attend, particularly if you own a laptop you can take with
you to check David Price's list. Please mail us here at news@xxxxxxxxx
if you are interested, and we will pass your details on.

-----------------------------

Library for sale

Charles Norton, a Cincinnati resident, Mark Twain scholar and former
librarian is moving into a retirement community. His 11,000 volume
personal library (including 800 books by or about Mark Twain) is up for
sale. A URL is given below for more information, there is no
information in the article as to how many of these might be pre-1923.

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/09/13/loc_twainscholar13.html

Many thanks to Ken Reeder for this item

----------------------------

Music - Help with Finale and Sibelius

The current music files in PG are in Finale format, and Joel Erikson
is hoping to convert them into Sibelius. There's only one problem. He
could really use help from someone who has a copy of Finale to do this. If you
think you can help Joel in any way, please mail him at joel at
oneporpoise.com, or mail us here at the newsletter and we will pass
your message along.


                    -------------------

Distributed Proofreaders Update


The general purpose of this column is to explore the variety of
processes which combine to form the working matrix of Distributed
Proofreaders. This week we're going to take a slightly different view
and turn our focus to something all DP'ers share...a motive for
participating in the project. 

We all have a need for some degree of certainty in our lives. Having
something or someone we can trust and feel familiar with is satisfying
on several levels. That we find such certainty at DP is a benefit to
the project which seems unlikely to have been in the original
plans. We don't talk much in the forums about the internal, individual
experiences we each have with the project. The daily exchanges tend to
the development process and the ways of improving it. Once in a while
though, the inner life of proofers will bubble to the surface.

DP is server based. So there are times when the project is not
accessible for one reason or other. It is during such 'no access'
moments that we each realize how much DP has come to be a positive
fixture in our lives. If you have been with the project a while, you
already know some variation of this recognition.  If you have not
spent time at DP, it is well worth your effort to give it a try. What
unfolds here, beyond book making, is a true expression of those young,
'heady' dreams of what the Internet could become. 

Here is a real on-line community which spans continents, languages and
time zones, while in the process of enriching the cultural &
historical heritage of the world. Through the day to day log-in we
tend to lose sight of this grand vision, we just return without giving
it much thought, pick up whatever task we left off or just proof a few
pages. And yet, something inside us is satisfied by this act
... something innately Human.

Over the coming days our attention is going to be drawn back to the
dark events of two years ago. Whether we have personal attachments or
the mass media besieges us with images, our minds will reflect upon
how much the world has changed over that time. It is natural in this
passage to feel a deepening sense of uncertainty with many events of
significance reshaping the world that was once familiar to us.

At such times as this, the subtle strengths of the Distributed
Proofreading project can provide a base of 'solid ground' when no
other seems available to us. At DP we can always drink of some
certainties; we know there is a place in the world where our time
and energy can be positively invested; we know we will always find a
familiar circle of like-minded people who care about similar issues
and values to our own, and should we ever voice a need to this circle,
they will come to our side and stand together with
us. Ask, and you will see this. I have, and it is true.

Perhaps the greatest gift that DP offers an individual is the
certainty that they can make a difference in the world. It may seem a
small contribution on a daily measure, but every page makes a real
difference.  Like a single stone within a wall, unnoticed to a passer-by,
yet essential to the support of a cathedral, so are the individual
pages at DP to the World Library of PG's vision. There is something
within each proofer, however unconscious, that realizes this truth. In
these uncertain times, that's one of the payments in gold that
inspires our motivation to keep coming back.

In the next issue we'll return to the beaten path and explore the two
stages of the Post Production process, where texts are re-assembled
and readied for their debut in the Project Gutenberg stacks.

Until then, may this week be fair, and lead you closer to your dreams!

Thierry
                    -------------------

Radio Gutenberg Update

http://www.radio-gutenberg.com

This week RG is running AEsop's Fables on channel 1 and The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis on channel 2.


If you are interested in which etexts and authors have been turned
into audio ebooks, a list can now be found on the Radio Gutenberg website.


If you are interested in creating a slide-show with a soundtrack
from your favourite book, or piece of literature please mail us here
at news@xxxxxxxxx and we will pass your message on.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Improved Service

In a bid to make the newsletter more helpful to readers who may be
using screen reading software. We are able to offer the booklisting in
a different format to make your life a little easier. An example of
the changed listing is given below. If you would like either a daily
or weekly version of this list please email news@xxxxxxxxx, and state
which version you require. 

{Note to the unwary: this is an example.}

      34 NEW ETEXTS FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG US
A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman  Mar 2005[esperxxx.xxx]7787

The Female Gamester, by Gorges Edmond Howard       Apr 2005[fmgstxxx.xxx]7840
[Subtitle: A Tragedy]

A Primary Reader, by E. Louise Smythe              Apr 2005[preadxxx.xxx]7841
[Also posted: illustrated HTML, zipped only - pread10h.zip]

The Rise of Iskander, by Benjamin Disraeli         Apr 2005[?riskxxx.xxx]7842
[7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7risk10.txt and 7risk10.zip]
[8-bit version with accented characters in 8risk10.txt and 8risk10.zip]
[rtf version with accented characters in 8risk10r.rtf and 8risk10r.zip]
[rtf version has numbered paragraphs; txt version has no paragraph numbers]


----------------------------------------------------------------------

QUICK WAYS TO MAKE A DONATION TO PROJECT GUTENBERG

A. Send a check or money order to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
809 North 1500 West
Salt Lake City, UT 84116


B. Donate by credit card online

NetworkForGood:
http://www.guidestar.org/partners/networkforgood/donate.jsp?ein=64-6221541

or

PayPal to "donate@xxxxxxxxxxxxx":
https://www.paypal.com
/xclick/business=donate%40gutenberg.net&item_name=Donate+to+Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg's success is due to the hard work of thousands of
volunteers over more than 30 years.  Your donations make it possible
to support these volunteers, and pay our few employees to continue the
creation of free electronic texts.  We accept credit cards, checks and
money transfers from any country, in any currency.

Donations are made to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
(PGLAF).  PGLAF is approved as a charitable 501(c)(3) organization by
the US Internal Revenue Service, and has the Federal Employer Identification
Number (EIN) 64-6221541.

For more information, including several other ways to donate, go to
http://www.gutenberg.net  or email gbnewby@xxxxxxxxxxx

----------------------------------------------------------------------

3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features

Nosferatu

There are surprisingly many story lines connected to this single
black-and-white piece of silent film, where in bright midnight light
the bat-like vampire is coming to the unsuspicious human habitat on a
ship with the dead captain banded to the wheel.

First is the story of the movie itself : a bastard child of gifted
German director Friederich Wilhelm Murnau conceived illegally from the
well-known novel 'Dracula' of late Dubliner Bram (Abraham) Stoker
(1847-1912)
(http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_bram_stoker.html).
The beautiful but jealous widow Florence Stoker was so furious about
this adultery, that she had almost immediately started the copyright
law-suit against movie and its creator.  The naïve and feeble attempts
of camouflaging the true source of movie plot, like changing the names
of people and places, didn't help much and the verdict of the court
was tough - to stop the film distribution and to burn (like a real
witchcraft possession!) all existing copies of it. Sounds bad, huh?
However there are always people that do not obey the law. Depending on
its profitability for us, we call this fortunately or unfortunately
quality of human behavior. In this case it is commonly agreed to use
the word 'fortunately', at least by the horror movie lovers and cinema
historians. Several pirate copies survived the calamity, so PG now is
able now to bin it for amusement and scarring of future
generations. The edifying thing is that the trial actually gave the
final 'kick' to the whole blood-sucking theme in general and to the
Stoker's 'Dracula' in particular, the history of vampire horror
entertainments was started and the widow Stoker became rich from the
copyright percentage (pay attention, oh PG people, to the Power of Publicity!). 

Second there is the story in the movie. When the fable plot is more or
less preserved to be same as in original novel, the essence and
characters are quite different. The interpretations of the changes are
abundant and various. Most of them, naturally, have strictly
freudistic character, because it seems that unlike the novel, where
the brave humans are fighting the 'bad guys'- vampires, the movie is
more like an obsessive love story. The vampire is not the cold-blooded
and even somewhere charming aristocrat, looking on humans as on a menu
in a restaurant, but the unhappy hideous creature tortured by desire.
Many say that the maniacal Count was the reflection of Murnau's
illicit love to the killed boy-friend Hans. The Jim Shepard's
fictional biography of the Murnau called also 'Nosferatu' is strongly
supporting this version.  

Thirdly, it is the story about the making of this movie. 'The
historical landmark', 'the blueprint', 'great classics of film' are
the most widely used epithets regarding this Expressionist classic on
the 8-mm film. The negative and superimposed images and the oddly shot
scene angles of Murnau are, as they say, the very grammar of art-film
making. Another innovation was the usage of natural stages, blurred
and strangely shaped by special effects. Ellen sitting in the dunes
covered with iron crucifixes or strange angles of the castle are the
classical examples of the strange emotions brilliantly transformed to
the visual images. As Murau said by himself "I like the reality of
things, but not without the fantasy - they must dovetail. Is that not
so with life, with human reactions and emotions? We have our thoughts
and also our deeds." 

The last story is about the director. Friederich Wilhelm Murnau was
born as Friederich Wilhelm Plumpe in the small German town of
Bielefeld, on Dec. 28, 1889. After studying Philology and later Art
History at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg respectively, he
studied in Max Reinhart's drama school by direct invitation of Max
Reinhart himself. Then came the war and F.W. was mobilized to German
air force. Young actor's serving in the army during WW1 is quite
remarkably reminisant of the 'Catch 22' lines - After seven (!) crashes
of his airplane, he succeeded finally to get lost in the fog and land
in the neutral Switzerland, where he happily remained interned till
the end of hostilities. There he performed in theater and in exchange
for the safety made a lot of propaganda films for the German
embassy. Back in Berlin after the war, he formed a production company
(Murnau Veidt Filmgesellschaft) and made several movies in noir-Gothic
fashion like 'Der Knabe in Blau/The Boy in Blue'(1919), and 'Satanas'
(also 1919). Then he makes his first (and more successful) attempt to
violate the copyright law by making movie based on Stevenson's
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", called "Der Januskoph/The Janus Head"
(1920). All those movies are lost in the time-space so the first
remaining one is "Der Gang in Die Nacht/The Gang in the Night" (1920).

The fame started to burn its incense to Murnau-director only in 1922
after Nosferatu. Then "Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh" in 1924
established his international reputation and he was invited to
Hollywood*. He was customarily unhappy overseas, complaining about too
much pressure and control from the money-power people, since his first
project, "Sunrise" (1927), was extremely artistic and extremely
non-profitable. So Murnau's wings were significantly cut by initially
generous William Fox, by induced happy endings and other tricks that
supposed to make the new movies more life- and
money-supporting. Naturally, F.W. broke his contract and made few
documentaries with the newly-established Colorart company. The new
company was artistically supportive but also naturally not
profitable. So after the bankruptcy of Colorart, he sponsored the new
movie 'Tabu' from his own pocket. Then in March of 1931 F.W.Murau was
killed in a car accident before the film premiered. 

The final shots will be of the world today - the search for Nosferatu
in Google gives 275.000 links. Not all of them are about the movie,
there are plenty of horror games and infernal stories, when the name
itself is already a common noun, representing vampire clans and forces
of dark. The remake of Nosferatu in 1979 together with the new
rock-based score are mostly curiosities and almost forgotten
already. The freshly made 'Interview with a vampire' where the
respectable actor Max Schreck was portrayed as a real vampire, is not
so bad according to reviews, however will probably survive in history
mostly by the connection with it's famous prototype - the black and
white piece of silent film, where in bright midnight light the
bat-like vampire is coming to the unsuspicious human habitat on ship
with the dead captain banded to the wheel               

That's all, folks.   

Nosferatu final titles:
Director:
 F.W.Murnau
Screenplay:
 Henrik Galeen
Year Released:
 1922
Starring cast (in alphabetical order):
- Gustav Botz .... Dr. Sievers, Town Doctor 
- Karl Etlinger .... Sailor 
- John Gottowt .... Professor Bulwer 
- Alexander Granach .... Knock 
- Wolfgang Heinz .... First mate 
- Guido Herzfeld .... Innkeeper 
- Ruth Landshoff .... Lucy Westrenka 
- Max Nemetz .... Captain 
- G.H. Schell .... Westrenka 
- Max Schreck .... Graf Orlok/Nosferatu 
- Greta Schr?der .... Ellen Hutter 
- Albert Venohr .... Sailor 
- Heinrich Witte .... Sailor 
- Hardy von Francois .... Doctor in Hospital 
- Gustav von Wangenheim .... Hutter 
Original score:
        Hans Erdmann (1887-1942) A recording of this spine-chilling
        masterpiece is available on CD on the RCA Victor Red Seal
        label, catalogue number 09026 68143 2.

And few useful internet sites:

http://www.hollywood.com/celebs/bio/celeb/1676735, for nicely written biography
http://www.phillyburbs.com/halloween2001/dracula/nosferatwo.shtml, for
a funny freudistic plot interpretation
http://www.sloppyfilms.com/murnau/nosferat.html, for real passionate movie 
review


And for those who like the author of these notes do not like the noir and 
vampires,
see http://www.whitehouseanimationinc.com/kunstbar.htm
for nice illustration of influence of the art on our lives 

Gali Sirkis


* Gali's original version of these notes stated 'Hollowood'. Please add your 
own irony - Ed

                    -------------------

About Radio Gutenberg.

My first contact with the Gutenberg project came in or about 1984. I was 
stunned as the value and worth of the collection were indisputable, yet it 
existed in a world without price tags.

In the early 1990s, my father-in-law began to lose his vision to
macular degeneration. By 2000 he was no longer able to watch television 
or read the newspaper. Radio is now his only link to the world, outside 
of family.  

IBM came into the linux world at that point in my life, and made a 
copy of ViaVoice running the Eloquence engine available for download. 
It was Emacspeak compatible. Jon Grimm and I made a bootable CD-ROM 
and packaged it with about a hundred of the most famous and popular 
texts in the collection.

At about the same time, Jon and I began to experiment with live broadcasting 
over the internet using Icecast. We also engaged in several excursions 
introducing the Gutenberg Collection and these technologies into local 
public school systems. A while later, the financial underpinnings of the 
Gutenberg Project showed us their fraying edges, and the idea of Radio 
Gutenberg made itself apparent to me:

An interlinked network of local vendors creating the necessary materials 
for disabled access to web-based federal resources, using our "discovered" 
technology, could generate funding on a more stable footing than the existing 
Gutenberg mechanisms, and also make the collection accessable to that same 
visually impaired, illiterate and English as a second language audience.

Why this, and not something else? Self determination. Rather than choosing 
to follow a formula that would take us where we were told we should go, we 
found our own in a model that begins with who and where we are.

The first and most critical problem that had to be solved in creating audio 
books that would be useful was to create a means of production that would 
create sufficient volumes of materials to make an impact, and still preserve 
the meaning of the works to be presented in audio.   

A book is in many ways analogous to a musical score in that the words 
represent pitch sequences, and the punctuation represents phrasing - 
especially rests ( the silences).  The reading of a book, like the playing of 
music, depends first and foremost on meter.  So that is how we built the book 
editing software, to make the meter acceptable first, and then to address 
other problems in the performance.  Once an acceptable meter had been 
achieved, the audio books suffered from problems similar to those 
experienced by a human reader suffering from stroke damage.  So we had a 
speech pathologist submit our editor software to a battery of standardized 
tests.

Today our efforts are focused on accent reduction, correct pronunciation of 
French, Spanish and Native American place names, resolution of accents in 
homographs and speed.  Our ultimate goal is to create a machine that can 
audio enable the Library of Congress in one year, unattended. We have dubbed 
that machine "Deep Thought".

This quarter we are working on a new process that will allow users to create a 
desired book on demand, and follow the progress through a web-based 
"dashboard". This process will allow us to keep the hundred or so most 
popular requested audio books available for immediate download as a zip file, 
a set of .mp3 files or a CD image, with any other work in the collection 
available through "on-demand" creation. 

Over the long term, we have five major goals :

1 - More human reading style for all Gutenberg audio books.

Current activities include place name databases, homograph dictionaries 
and phrase level automatic diagramming for inflection. With these
features in place, the speech synthesizer and our automatic 
editor may achieve parity with locally available volunteer readers,
and superiority in many cases.

2 - Establishment of a broadcast network on the internet.

If we had 50 icecast broadcast servers in operation today, each hosting four 
monophonic broadcast channels, for a total of 200 channels, that would provide 
a reach similar in kind to a PBS, and provide a venue for fund raising.  

3 - Creation of new works for the collection.

When the funding mechanisms have achieved a state of equilibrium, we hope to 
fund festivals, camps and workshops that bring together young unknown talent 
for the purpose of creating new teleplays, musical compositions and
stories for distribution by Gutenberg. Bringing musicians and writers
together on a campus with facilities to produce video will allow
budding composers to try their hand at writing sound tracks, something 
unavailable anywhere today.

4 - Procurement of copyrighted works for the collection.

Our most basic activity in this vein is in securing copyright permissions for 
pre-existing works.  Our efforts are focused on the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of 
Narnia, the SciFi channel's collection of classic science fiction (one author 
at a 
time), Fordham University's Internet History collections and ESA/NASA 
materials. 

Long term we hope to garner a number of works from PhD candidates at
accessable universities, especially in chemistry, medicine and
physics. Our primary sources for these materials today include the
Michoud Shuttle External Tank Assembly Facility, NASA's Stennis Space
Flight Center, University of Maryland and University of New Orleans.

Still very preliminary and speculative, we are also attempting to
procure musical performances by the Louisiana Symphony Orchestra and a
group of graduate students at the University of Akron.

5 - Creation of Video works for the collection.

The Solar System series Jon and I have been working on for the past year or so 
began as a text only draft of the "Encyclopedia of the Solar System" 
ISBN 0-12-226805-9 major planetary chapters at opensourceschools.org.  
Since then, we have begun to separate the materials into volumes that 
address the role of the gravitational influence and state changes in the 
character of the Solar System, and feature new, original 3D videos that 
demonstrate the main features of the Solar System as we understand them today.

The first volume of this series is due to be released on December 10th as a 
DVD in the Gutenberg collection.

We are also engaged in preliminary assessments of DVD based text books on 
algebra and geometry.  These textbooks will be unique in that they use 
visualizations to demonstrate how a field project's data are typically 
collected, indexed and inferentially expanded into a summation using the 
tools of algebra and geometry.  We hope that this approach will result in the 
reader acquiring the "right" sort of curiosity in the world, when procedural 
skills are acquired because insight and intuition demand them.  In this way 
the "ethos" of a theorem or algebraic translation procedure is revealed in 
the context of a real world problem.  As a basis, we are selecting materials 
from water diversion projects here in Louisiana that intend to reclaim lost 
marshlands, and also environmental impact statements by both the EPA and 
Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries / Louisiana Department of Natural Resources.

Long term, we hope these works establish the necessary preconditions for 
Gutenberg to become the publisher of choice for new studies of the ecology of 
North America's gulf coast.

This probably sounds like a lot for two people to pull off.  It really isn't 
in terms of the man-hours required.  And other non-profits could provide what's 
needed without spending a dime (the physical facilities are paid for and 
under-utilized). Putting it all down on paper has been a tad
disheartening, but that too is an illusion. All it takes to make this
reality is for the right people to say "OK". I hope that starts with you.

Thank you, patient reader for making it this far.  Your comments are
most welcome, especially if you decide to embark on your own new
projects in a similar vein.

Mike Eschman, Founder of Radio Gutenberg.

                    -------------------

Quiz

The answers to last weeks' quiz are below. Mary Wilson almost wins the
newsletter Smartypants award as she was the only person to submit an
entry, but she had switched two answers. Instead, she wins our eternal
gratitude, and shame on the rest of you. So, the Smartypants award
stays in the cupboard for a rollover next time. Thanks again to Tonya.


ANSWERS:
The theme of this one is children's books:

1. Anne of Green Gables etext92/anne11.txt

c. Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main
road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders
and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its
source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place.


2. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz etext93/wizoz10.txt

f. Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with
Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's
wife.


3. The Secret Garden etext94/gardn11.txt

d. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor
to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most
disagreeable-looking child ever seen.


4. A Little Princess etext94/lprss11.txt

a. Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick
and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted
and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-
looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven
rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.


5. Five Children and It etext97/fivit10.txt

g. The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty
hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to
put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, 'Aren't we
nearly there?'


6. The Princess and the Goblin etext96/prgob10.txt

h. There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great
country full of mountains and valleys.


7. The Jungle Book etext95/jnglb10.txt

b. It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills
when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself,
yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of
the sleepy feeling in their tips.


8. Black Beauty etext95/bbeau10.txt

i. The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant
meadow with a pond of clear water in it.


9. The Wind in the Willows etext95/wwill10.txt

e. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-
cleaning his little home.

{Hey, I got that one - Ed}
                    -------------------

Notes from Posted

Inspired by this weeks' suggestions about where it is possible to
source etexts from, Gali takes a look around the internet to find out, well...

just what is out there?


After shallow dive in the slightly troubled waters of web Orbis
Tertius, I've fished out several sources for e-texts with one thing in
common - they do not have a clue about PG. No link or ever
mentioning. They do know each other, though. OK, indeed, I am a
stranger in PG debris, with infinitely small understanding of the life
behind the emails, so let's go to business:

Starting from the most familiar for myself: http://lib.ru - library of
Maxim Moshkov contains huge amount various books in Russian. While it
might be a problem with Russian copyright, the Russian classical
literature is widely available there - Tolstoj, Pushkin and Gogol for
sure will not sue PG for the unauthorized e-copies of their work. The
translations are also readily available upon request. Cooperation of
PG with this source of e-text has one more important point - The
potential proofreading power of Russian readers is enormous - most of
them are literate, enjoy the process and have an access to the internet.