Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (often abbreviated as PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. It is the oldest digital library, with the majority of the items it provides being full texts of public domain books.

History

Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971. While he was attending the University of Illinois, Hart obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab, as he was friends with some of the operators. He was given an operator's account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; that account has since been variously estimated to have been $100,000 or $100,000,000 worth of time. Hart would never have been able to use up that much computer time, but he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something that could be considered worth that much money.

Related Topics:
Michael Hart - 1971 - University of Illinois - Xerox Sigma V - Mainframe computer

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This particular computer happened to be one of the 15 nodes on the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. He happened to have a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text.

Related Topics:
Computer network - Internet - United States Declaration of Independence - E-text

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The project was named after the 15th century German printer Johannes Gutenberg who propelled the movable type printing press revolution.

Related Topics:
15th century - Johannes Gutenberg - Printing press

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By the mid-1990s, Hart was running PG from Illinois Benedictine College and more volunteers had joined the effort.

Related Topics:
1990s - Illinois Benedictine College

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As image scanners and optical character recognition software improved in quality and became more widely available, PG volunteers began using them to help create ebooks. Previously, all texts had been manually entered.

Related Topics:
Image scanner - Optical character recognition

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Later Hart came to an arrangement with Carnegie Mellon University, which agreed to administer Project Gutenberg's finances. With the volume of texts being produced increasing, various volunteers began to take over the day-to-day aspects of running the project, which Hart had done by himself previously.

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In the year 2000, a non-profit corporation, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc. was formally created to administer the legal needs of the project. This was chartered in Mississippi with an IRS ruling that donations to it are tax-deductible. Dr. Gregory Newby, long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer, became the first CEO of the Foundation.

Related Topics:
Non-profit corporation - Mississippi - IRS - Gregory Newby

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In 2000, Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, which allowed the proofreading of scanned texts to be distributed among many volunteers over the Internet. This effort greatly increased the number and variety of texts being added to PG, as well as making it easier for new volunteers start contributing.

Related Topics:
Charles Franks - Distributed Proofreaders - Internet

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In 2004, a new online catalog was implemented. This helped to make PG content easier to browse, access, and link to.

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