Most of the books on the CCEL are contributed by volunteers. Your labor as a volunteer helps to make Christian classics available by CD-ROM to thousands of seminaries, missionaries, and ministers around the world that otherwise may have almost no access theological books. In addition, these books are available free for any use on the Internet to Christians, interested non-Christians, publishers, and anyone else who wants to access them. Currently, around two million users download the equivalent of about one book each per year, on average. And your close work with one of these books may benefit you as well.
The books prepared by volunteers are placed in the public domain. That means that they can be used by anyone for any purpose -- copy and give to your friends or publish and sell. These books tend to find themselves in new print and CD-ROM editions, on many electronic libraries, and the like. We try to make high quality, complete electronic texts in a standard format, so that they can be widely used and reused.
When a public domain edition of a book is found, it may be typed or scanned. Scanned books may have their spine cut off so that they can be fed through a page-fed scanner. The scans are then usually processed by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to generate an electronic text. The resulting text must then be spell-checked, formatted in Microsoft Word, proofread, and saved in RTF format. Typed books also must be formatted and proofread. Bibliographic information and editing history are added.
The resulting text is then added to the CCEL. Programs automatically convert from RTF to other formats including HTML, plain text, and ASCII. Programs also add information about the text to a database system, and it automatically appears on index pages, on the What's New page, etc.
Preparing a typical book may take 10 to 50 hours, and much longer from some difficult volumes. Typing is just as fast as scanning and formatting, if the printed text doesn't scan very well, though the kinds of errors that typists make tend to be harder for proofreaders to find.
Project Manager
The project manager oversees a project and communicates with volunteers working on the project via email. The manager assigns tasks to volunteers, explains to volunteers what needs to be done, and checks that tasks get completed. In the end, the manager assembles and formats the parts of the text and returns a completed, formatted, proofread electronic text to the CCEL administrator.
For larger projects, the project manager should maintain a web page showing the tasks that need to be done and their status. As tasks are assigned or completed, the manager updates the web page. The web page should contain the list of tasks, the name and email address of the person working on the task, and the status of the task. Tasks may include finding and copying/scanning public domain books or sets on the wanted list, scanning the book and putting electronic files on line or photocopying it and sending pages to volunteers, typing all parts of the book or set, putting the parts together into volumes, and formatting volumes in Microsoft Word according to the CCEL guidelines.
Qualifications: a project manager should enjoy communicating with volunteers via email and the time to answer email every day or two. He or she should have Microsoft Word and be familiar with (or willing to learn) the use of paragraph styles and other formatting used for the CCEL. A project manager must be organized and reliable.
Bibliographic Researcher
The bibliographic researcher finds books on the CCEL wanted list, in public domain editions. He or she then copies or scans the book and sends the result to a project manager. Or, if the book is purchased, say at a used bookstore, it can be sent to me for scanning with a page-feed scanner. Electronic images of pages are then put on the server.
Bibligraphic researchers may also find a book already in electronic form, perhaps on the internet. The task then would be to determine the edition and copyright status.
Another task is to look up the MARC record at the library of congress for each book added (and books already on the CCEL) and send them to me.
Typist
The typist may receive photocopies of a book or type directly from electronic page images on the computer screen. He or she types the book and may format in Microsoft Word according to the CCEL formatting guidelines. Microsoft Word is necessary for applying CCEL formatting, but almost any word processor (including WordPad, which comes with Windows 95) can be used to enter text with bold and italics, different font sizes, etc. according to these simple guidelines.
Formatter
If a book has been scanned, the resulting text will have many errors. The formatter takes an RTF file of a book that has been scanned and spell-checks and formats in Microsoft Word according to the CCEL guidelines. The formatter may also want to proof-read the resulting text, although someone else can also do that part of the job. If a book has been typed, the formatter would assemble the typed pieces (if necessary), spell-check, and format according to the CCEL formatting guidelines. Typed books also need to be proof-read.
Proofreader
The proofreader is responsible for carefully reading a text and finding errors. This works best by printing out the book on paper (laser printer recommended), reading it slowly, and circling any questionable words or formatting. The printout is then mailed to someone with access to the original text, who makes the corrections.