User talk:Dante Alighieri

This discussion has been moved from the Wikisource:Scriptorium

I guess this is what I get for ignoring the mailing lists for a few months... I didn't know about Wikisource! :) I'm willing to help. I also have access to a scanner with very good OCR software, so let me know if there's anything pressing that's not already available in an electronic format. --Dante Alighieri 21:36, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Welcome! And thanks for the offer. I'm also glad that you recognize that the most important material is the stuff that's not already available. A lot also depends on what material you have available for scanning. So far people have been entering whatever they feel so it seems like a bit of a hotch-potch. Since we are adding whole books I think that Wikisource has to be more copyright conscious than the other projects. Fair use may not be as relevant here. So turning the question back to you, what do you have that could be scanned? Eclecticology 03:15, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, on hand, quite a lot actually, but I'd have to do careful checking on copyright on a few of the more borderline cases. I also have unlimited access to the University of California library system and am close enough to UCBerkeley to go there on any given weekend. This strikes me as useful for a number of reasons. While I can't scan them, the Bancroft library on campus has a huge collection of rare (read VERY expensive) books. Like, say, that first edition of Paradise Lost I was looking at a few years back. This means that if there's any special requests like "hey, in that rare first edition of (blank) did this line appear, or is that only in later versions?" can be conceivably answered by myself... given that I have limited free time and it might take a month for me to haul my ass out there with a pencil and paper and write the stuff down manually. ;) Also, it means that if there's regular books (not rare ones) that the main library doesn't have, I can have them shipped there and waiting for me to check out. So, we pretty much have access to just about anything people could want. Check this webpage for a few catalogs that list all the UCB and UC-wide holdings if you think you might need me to get something specific. --Dante Alighieri 09:22, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

"Quite a lot," sounds like the confession of a bibliomaniac.:-) Since I am one myself, that is not a complaint.

I don't think that we are anywhere near the sophistication required to appreciate a variorum of Paradise Lost. I do think that it would be to Wikisource's advantage to go after a few topics in an orderly fashion. We could become known for targetted items. It crossed my mind about Arthur Conan Doyle. His Sherlock Holmes works are well known, but there are others of his work that are fairly unknown, that were published before 1923, and are not available at all. Arguments might even be made to get around copyright problems for his later works, and I can look into that in more detail if we proceed. If we can do something about the obscure works, I would feel less sceptical about including the commonly available ones.

I also looked at the works of the early Nobel Prize winners. Prudhomme is available only in pdf format one page at a time. I couldn't find much about what Roentgen might have published except his original paper on the discovery of X-rays.

These are only some of the possible ideas. Eclecticology