[Coco] RainbowArchive . The Rainbow Archive Project

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 21:37 -0600, Michael Wayne Harwood wrote:
> Lonnie has said that he is willing to give a limited number of "freebies"
> as long as the volunteers sign an agreement not to make any copies for
> others.  Essentially it breaks down that it's going to be easiest to have
> three or four dedicated volunteers that will be scanning or doing post
> production.  This is the main reason that I posted my requirements of a
> volunteer needing to do work on at the very least a full Volume of
> magazines.
> 

That's not going to work for OCR, except for the first approximation
machine OCR.

> I can ask Lonnie about this to clarify if you'd like, but I get the
> impression that he wants as few people as possible to be actively working
> on the "creating content" portion of the project.

> 
> I realize that there are going to be constraints that we will need to work
> around, but I do not think that it's unworkable.

Sure, something can be done. But constraints are constraints. They will
either affect the quality or the cost or timeliness of delivery of the
product.

Anwyay, this does mean that we can't do the kind of OCR that's been
described so far. The only way I think that can work cost effectively is
if we distribute the work of doing corrections. say one issue for a
given person.

At least assuming we want a good quality OCR, anyway. If it's good
enough to distribute a machine's first approximation of the text, then I
think OCR is doable, otherwise, I'm thinking it isn't.

Here's the way OCR work on volunteer projects is usually done: one
person scans in the work. Then fragments are given to various people to
provide corrections. Usually it's a lot of people, since it's a lot of
work. In general though that's not a problem for the copyright holder
since no one has the whole work... everyone interested enough to
volunteer is going to come back and license a copy at the end of the
day. Perhaps Lonnie's concerns are more the legal issues of having a lot
of claims after the fact on the work. But there's no reason that stuff
can't be handled completely by the legal agreement.

-- John.