Proiectul Gutenberg

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Proiectul Gutenberg (abreviat adesea ca PG) este un efort voluntar de a digitaliza, arhiva şi distribui lucrări culturale. Fondat în 1971, proiectul reprezintă cea mai veche bibliotecă digitală. Majoritatea obiectelor acestuia sunt texte integrale din cărţi aflate în domeniul public. Proiectul încearcă să-şi menţină obiectele gratuite, transformându-le totodată în formate ce pot fi folosite aproape pe orice computer.

Imagine:Pg cd.JPG
Textele Gutenberg au fost transpuse pe CD-ROM.

Cuprins

[modifică] Istorie

Proiectul Gutenberg a fost început de către Michael Hart în 1971. Hart, student al Universităţii din Illinois, a obţinut acces la un calculator mainframe tip Xerox Sigma V în laboratorul de cercetare al universităţii. Datorită operatorilor prietenoşi, Hart primeşte un cont de durată nelimitată la computer; valoarea sa a fost estimată variat între $100,000 şi $100,000,000. Hart a spus că dorea să "dea înapoi" acest cadou făcând ceva care ar fi valorat această sumă.

Computerul respectiv avea să devină unul dintre cele 15 noduri din reţeaua de calculatoare ce avea să devină ulterior Internetul. Hart era de părere că într-o bună zi computerele vor deveni accesibile publicului şi a decis să facă disponibile în mod gratuit lucrări de literatură. Întâmplător avea în ghiozdan o copie a Declaraţiei de Independenţă a Statelor Unite şi aceasta a devenit primul e-text al Proiectului Gutenberg.

A denumit proiectul în cinstea lui Johannes Gutenberg, tipograful german din secolul XV care a propulsat revoluţia presei de imprimare detaşabile.

Până la mijlocul anilor 1990, Hart dirija activitatea PG de la Colegiul Benedictin Illinois. Mai mulţi voluntari s-au alăturat acestui efort. La început, majoritatea textelor au fost adăugate manual, până la îmbunătăţirea şi distribuirea scanerelor pentru imagini şi a programelor pentru recunoaştere optică de caractere.

Hart a ajuns mai târziu la un acord cu Universitatea Carnegie Mellon, care a fost de acord să administreze finanţele Proiectului Gutenberg. Pe măsură ce volumul textelor electronice creştea, voluntarii au preluat operaţiile zilnice ale proiectului pe care Hart la executase până atunci.

În 2000, o corporaţie non-profit, Fundaţia de Arhivistică Literară a Proiectului Gutenberg, Inc. s-a deschis în Mississippi pentru a îngriji nevoile legale ale proiectului. Donaţiile către proiect sunt deductibile. Gregory Newby, voluntar cu vechime la PG a fost numit primul CEO al fundaţiei.

Pietro Di Miceli, un voluntar italian, a creat şi administrat primul sit web al Proiectului Gutenberg şi a început dezvoltarea primului catalog online. În cei peste zece ani de participare, paginile proiectului au câştigat un număr de premii, deseori fiind integrat în listări de excelenţă, contribuind astfel la popularitatea proiectului [1].

Începând din 2004, un catalog online îmbunătăţit a uşurat navigarea, accesarea şi legarea către PG.

Proiectul Gutenberg este găzduit acum de către ibiblio la Universitatea din Carolina de Nord la Chapel Hill.

[modifică] Scopul colecţiei

Din martie 2006, Proiectul Gutenberg a declarat posesia a 18000 de itemuri in colectia sa, Cu o medie de peste 50 de e-books adăugate saptamanal. [1]

Majoritatea sunt lucrari de literatură din cultura vestică. In addition to literary forms such as novels, poetry, short stories, and drama, PG also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The PG collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music notation files.

Most releases are in English, but there are also significant numbers in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, and Chinese, as well as increasing numbers in many other languages.

Whenever possible, Gutenberg releases are available in plain text, mainly using US-ASCII character encoding but frequently extended to ISO-8859-1. Other formats may be released as well, when submitted by volunteers, with the most common being HTML. Formats which are not easily editable, such as PDF, are generally not considered to fit in with the goals of Project Gutenberg, although a few have been added to the collection. For years, there has been discussion of using some type of XML, although progress on that has been slow.

[modifică] Idealuri

Michael Hart said in 2004, "The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple: 'To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.'" [2]

A slogan of the project is "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy", because its volunteers aim to continue spreading public literacy and appreciation for the literary heritage just as public libraries began to do in the early 20th century.

Project Gutenberg is intentionally decentralized. For example, there is no selection policy dictating what texts to add. Instead, individual volunteers work on what they are interested in, or have available.

The PG collection is intended to preserve items for the long term, so they cannot be lost by any one localized accident. In an effort to ensure this, the entire collection is backed-up daily and mirrored on servers in many different locations.

[modifică] Probleme privind drepturile de autor

Project Gutenberg is careful to verify the status of its ebooks according to U.S. copyright law. Material is added to the PG archive only after it has received a copyright clearance, and records of these clearances are saved for future reference.

Unlike some other digital library projects, Project Gutenberg does not claim new copyright on titles it publishes. Instead, it encourages their free reproduction and distribution.

Most books in the PG collection are distributed as public domain under U.S. copyright law. The legalese included with each ebook puts few restrictions on what can be done with the texts (such as distributing them in modified form, or for commercial purposes) as long as the Project Gutenberg trademark is used. If the header is stripped and the trademark not used, then the public domain texts can be reused without any restrictions.

There are also a few copyrighted texts that Project Gutenberg distributes with permission. These are subject to further restrictions as specified by the copyright holder.

In 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended the duration of already-existing copyright by 20 years. This has prevented Project Gutenberg from adding many titles that would otherwise have become public domain in the U.S.

[modifică] Critici

Project Gutenberg has been criticized for lack of scholarly rigor in its etexts: for example, in inadequate detailing of editions used and in the omission of original published prefaces and critical apparatus. A marked improvement in preserving such text can be seen by comparing earlier texts with newer ones; most new e-texts preserve edition information and prefaces.

[modifică] Proiecte afiliate

All affiliated projects are independent organizations which share the same ideals, and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark. They often have a particular national, or linguistic focus.

  • Project Gutenberg Australia hosts many texts which are public domain according to Australian copyright law, but still under copyright (or of uncertain status) in the United States, with a focus on Australian writers and books about Australia.
  • PG-EU is a sister project which operates under the copyright law of the European Union. One of its aims is to include as many languages as possible into Project Gutenberg. It operates in Unicode to ensure that all alphabets can be represented easily and correctly.
  • Project Gutenberg of the Philippines [3] "aims to make as many books available to as many people as possible, with a special focus on the Philippines and Philippine languages".
  • Project Gutenberg Europe [4] is a project run by Project Rastko in Serbia-Montenegro. It aims at being a Project Gutenberg for all of Europe, and has started to post its first projects in 2005. It is running the Distributed Proofreaders software to quickly produce etexts.
  • Project Gutenberg Luxembourg [5] publishes mostly, but not exclusively, books that are written in Luxembourgish.
  • Project Gutenberg Consortia Center [6] is an affiliate specializing in collections of collections. These do not have the editorial oversight or consistent formatting of the main Project Gutenberg. Thematic collections, as well as numerous languages, are featured.
  • Projekti Lönnrot [7] is a project started by Finnish Project Gutenberg volunteers.

Although Projekt Gutenberg-DE was given permission to use the Gutenberg name years ago, not everyone considers it to be an affiliated project, because of philosophical differences. Projekt Gutenberg-DE copyrights its product and limits access to browsable web-versions of its texts.

For a list of other similar projects, some of which have been inspired by Project Gutenberg, see the list of digital library projects.

[modifică] Vezi şi

[modifică] Note

  1. According to GUTINDEX-2005 and GUTINDEX-2006, in the 62 weeks from January 5, 2005 to March 14, 2006, 3386 new PG numbers were posted. This averages out to 54.61 per week.

[modifică] Legături externe