Organizations: Project Guttenberg & The Text Archive

Saturday, May 08, 2004 - 02:38 AM

Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts). Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use. The Radio Gutenberg Subproject makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text.

And finally, The Sheet Music Subproject engages in digitizing public domain sheet music, using a variety of techniques, to enable study and performance.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.

Another project, The Text Archive has a very similar goal, to digitize texts and put them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival texts. By providing near-unrestricted access to these texts, they hope to encourage widespread use of texts in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.

Text Collections:
Million Book Project create a free-to-read, searchable digital library the approximate size of the combined libraries at Carnegie Mellon University, and one much bigger than the holdings of any high school library.

Open Source Books are books that do what the title implies.

Children's Library is focused on the inherent promise of the Internet to provide direct and global access to quality content for children. This collection includes works from the International Children's Digital Library.

Dance Manuals are just like the title says, a collection of manuals on dance techniques.

more info:
The Project Gutenberg Library has three portions:
1) Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.
2) Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.
3) References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.