[Foundation-l] [ol-discuss] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>...
> Let's take a practical example.  A classics professor I know (Greg
> Crane, copied here) has scans of primary source materials, some with
> approximate or hand-polished OCR, waiting to be uploaded and converted
> into a useful online resource for editors, translators, and
> classicists around the world.
>
> Where should he and his students post that material?

I am a bit confused.  Are these texts currently hosted at the Perseus
Digital Library?

If so, they are already a useful online resource. ;-)

If they would like to see these primary sources pushed into the
Wikimedia community, they would need to upload the images (or DjVu)
onto Commons, and the text onto Wikisource where the distributed
proofreading software resides.

We can work with them to import a few texts in order to demonstrate
our technology and preferred methods, and then they can decide whether
they are happy with this technology, the community, and the potential
for translations and commentary.

I made a start on creating a Perseus-to-Wikisource importer about a year ago...!

Or they can upload the djvu to Internet Archive.. or a similar
depositories... and see where it goes from there.

> Wherever they end up, the primary article about each article would
> surely link out to the OL and WS pages for each work (where one
> exists).

Wikisource has been adding OCLC numbers to pages, and adding links to
archive.org when the djvu files came from there (these links contain
an archive.org identifier).  There are also links to LibraryThing and
Open Library; we have very few rules ;-)

--
John Vandenberg