On Aug 5, 2012, at 7:38 PM, Gaurav Vaidya gaurav@ggvaidya.com wrote:
Hey everybody,
On 04-Aug-2012, at 5:41 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I am cataloguing the non-WM contacts I made at Wikimania. Reading up on them, basically making the time I didn't have during the conference to understand who they are. The BHL had three librarians at the conference, I remember that they were very interested in a solution for getting OCR corrections back into djvu files. They mentioned Wikisource in the blog post they made about the conference. I thought the list might be interested in what they had to say.
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/07/wikimania-2012.html
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.
Birgitte SB