Do any of you have experience of the commercial scanning and OCR of old books? Costs, reliability, recommended suppliers, etc?
As series of books in which I'm interested fall out of copyright on 1st January, and I'd like to have them digitised and available as ebooks. I don't think I'd have the time to scan them, page by page, but I would be willing to organise someone else doing so, to proof read and upload to Wikisource.
Which brings me to my next point: is there a good tutorial for uploading works to Wikisource? Or possibly some training available?
On 21 December 2013 12:46, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
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A series of books in which I'm interested fall out of copyright on 1st January, and I'd like to have them digitised and available as ebooks. I don't think I'd have the time to scan them, page by page, but I would be willing to organise someone else doing so, to proof read and upload to Wikisource.
Which brings me to my next point: is there a good tutorial for uploading works to Wikisource? Or possibly some training available?
Some good points to be made here, probably. English Wikisource has a sort
of division of labour, in which serious "uploaders" are a defined subgroup of the community.
Point 1 is : put the analogy with Commons out of your mind.
But the preferred route is to upload the files (large, djvu) to Commons first.
Explain what you have in mind at the Scriptorium on enWS. Bear in mind that US public domain is the main issue there, not the 70 year rule in the UK.
With a promising project - and if you have support for their proofing on enWS, that would be promising - you'll probably get help with the transfer to Wikisource. If that is not immediately forthcoming, do ask for pointers to the documentation in that forum; and give feedback on its limitations.
enWS simply doesn't have the bodies to document everything all the time to standards familiar from enWP. To state the obvious, it is helpful to have constructive suggestions on where the pages don't help as much as they could.
Charles
wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org