> I'm currently working with the BHL on a two-month, unrelated metadata project, part of which is making sure that BHL's illustration metadata can be easily synced with content in the Commons (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information_Art_of_Life for more details). So I don't know anything about BHL's plans for Wikisource, but let me know if I can help!
>
> Personally, I'd love to see more (annotated!) biodiversity texts in Wikisource, such as http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Salticidae_(Spiders)_of_Panama/Zygoballus -- these species descriptions are the formal definition of a new species, and the BHL has been a huge help in making these definitions available, online and for free, to taxonomists everywhere (to say nothing of tons of gorgeous illustrations! [1]). However, their transcription and indexing are largely automated, via OCR and text matching. Moving these essential resources into Wikisource, where transcriptions and indexing could be improved by hand, would be awesome!

To be honest I don't think they knew what Wikisource did before Wikimania. So I doubt there is anything so firm as "plans". I know Aubrey and I, at least, spoke with them. They are definately interested in the platform at Wikisource, but they want to re-integrate the corrections made back into their collection. This is something that is a problem with djvu files that we do not yet have an answer for.

Hi Gaurav,

I agree with Birgitte :-)

The BHL were very intrested in what we do, as were the guys from NARA.

The GLAM is a huge and crucial "dimension" ofr Wikisource future, I tried (very, very badly) to list some things here.

As Birgitte says, many GLAMs "want to re-integrate the corrections made back into their collection":

Wikisource is a free human proofreading platform, we correct OCR which is still not perfect and won't be for many years.

We "curate" texts and this is our added value.

So, one of the things Iyou could help us with is ask BHL *how* they would like to have the corrections reintegrated in their collection.

Would they like the proofread text put back in the djvu? They want it *mapped*? it is crucial or they could be satisfied also with a simple text layer inside the djvu?

Do they use djvu? Do they use other formats? Do they want something completely different?

These are some techical issues (which in part I'm discussing with Alex Brollo, who is digging again into the "put back the proofread layer innto the djvu" issue.

Another BIG issue is that we have a small userbase,

and I someone comes to us and says "here, you can have a gazillion books",

we won't proofread them untile the end of the times.

I think this is something who went "wrong" with the Gallica partnership

(by far the greatest Wikisource-GLAM collaboration)(I'm not blaming anyone, the fr.source community did great, but the books were just too many).

Is this something we can work together on?

Reaching a critical mass of users is crucial for sister projects,

and if some specific community found some solutions it would be great to share.

I'll start.

One thing it worked fot it.source was setting up a "Proofread text of the month", which is also advertised in the Wikipedia Main page (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagina_principale).

This lead some wikipedians to come and proofread few pages: we never had "casual" proofreaders and now we have :-)

Aubrey

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