Summary

  • Distributed Proofreaders, founded by Charles Franks in 2000, divided book correction into pages that volunteers could work on separately. Other people prepared the material and assembled the finished book.
  • Suzanne Shell recalled Uneasy Money passing two proofreading rounds in under twenty hours in January 2003. Her later work preparing beginners' projects left less time for the final processing of books.

Suzanne Shell had a sensible retirement plan: contribute properly to Project Gutenberg when she finally had time. Then the Internet offered her a smaller commitment and rather spoiled the timetable.

In her account preserved in Jim Tinsley's historical Project Gutenberg FAQ, Shell describes joining Distributed Proofreaders on 5 November 2002. She could choose how many pages to correct. A whole book had looked daunting; a few pages fitted into life as it was.

A book, served by the page

Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders in 2000. Its page-based design gave a volunteer a bounded piece of a larger job. The project's own description shows the essential arrangement: a scanned page alongside text produced by optical character recognition, ready for comparison and correction. Another reader could check the work against the same image.

That division made participation easier to start. Someone with a little time could help with a page whose scanning and preparation had already been done. The image supplied a shared reference; the corrected text could travel onward to another set of eyes. A contribution had an end small enough to reach before the rest of the day intervened.

Shell soon prepared a P. G. Wodehouse book of her own. She obtained clearance for Uneasy Money in late December, worked on scanning and OCR, and became its project manager. According to her account, proofreading began on 5 January 2003 and two rounds were completed in less than twenty hours. She watched the remaining page count fall.

The speed was real enough to surprise the person who had prepared the pages. It also produced the next job: turn the corrected pieces into a finished electronic book.

The crowd needed colleagues

Experienced volunteers recruited by Juliet Sutherland and other administrators helped train new post-processors. Shell learned with one of them. Later, she volunteered to manage fiction projects for beginners, where experienced second-round readers offered feedback. From February 2003, preparing and managing that work took more of her time; final book processing received less.

Her account makes the trade-off unusually visible. Training added people who could contribute, while using the time of people already able to finish a book. The site's growing capacity had to pass through someone's working day.

A contemporary recruitment notice shows that these were recognised as separate jobs. Project Gutenberg's newsletter of 26 November 2003 called for material, proofreaders and scanner operators. It invited people with scanned books still needing OCR or correction, and asked contributors to check what was already in the archive or being worked on.

The same notice made a separate offer to people who wanted to work on a whole book but lacked the time or equipment for scanning and initial preparation: take up post-processing. The invitation connected a particular appetite for work with a particular stage that needed doing. A book lover could choose the part that suited them.

The names at the other end

The catalogue entry for Uneasy Money still credits Suzanne L. Shell, Tom Allen, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. That short line records an outcome of collective work: a book readers can obtain, with the contributors named.

Between the corrected page and that catalogue entry sits the organising work that makes the page useful. Someone supplies the material, someone helps a newcomer understand a correction, someone looks after the complete text. A fast page counter gives these people more to work with—and more to arrange.

Shell's retirement project had become a working community before retirement arrived. Distributed Proofreaders made the first step small. Its volunteers then built ways to learn the larger ones. The Internet could serve up a page in an instant; experienced readers still had to make room for the next beginner.

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