Digital Text Community
November 13, 2007
Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of “The Digital Text Community” (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing “ink-on-paper” publications.
The full group charter is found at the group’s home page.
DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup’s default archive is poor, to say the least.)
Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:
The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing “ink-on-paper” publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.
Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. “gutvol-d”) and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)
And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)
The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:
“This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit.”
This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 13, 2007 5:27 PM
