Distributed Proofreaders

Distributed Proofreaders is a project to support the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg. Public domain works are scanned by the project managers and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Then individual pages are made available for volunteers to proofread by comparing the scanned page and the OCR output on one screen, thus distributing the time-consuming error correction process.

Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000. DP is now an official Project Gutenberg site. By December 2003, DP had contributed over 2,800 books to Project Gutenberg with 1,000 more in process. Gutenberg had a total of 10,700 books at that time.

Among many other works, Distributed Proofreaders is currently working on producing a complete electronic edition of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which will be available on Project Gutenberg when finished.

The Distributed Proofreaders editing process is similar to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which predates it by several years but is focused on the narrower topic of Christian texts.

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