Wednesday, October 29, 2014

GITenberg: Modern Maintenance Infrastructure for Our Literary Heritage

One day back in March, the Project Gutenberg website thought I was a robot and stopped letting me download ebooks. Frustrated, I resolved to put some Project Gutenberg ebooks into GitHub, where I could let other people fix problems in the files. I decided to call this effort "Project Gitenhub". On my second or third book, I found that Seth Woodworth had had the same idea a year earlier, and had already moved about a thousand ebooks into GitHub. That project was named "GITenberg". So I joined his email list and started submitting pull requests for PG ebooks that I was improving.

Recently, we've joined forces to submit a proposal to the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, whose theme is "How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities? ". Here are some excerpts:
Abstract 
Project Gutenberg (PG) offers 45,000 public domain ebooks, yet few libraries use this collection to serve their communities. Text quality varies greatly, metadata is all over the map, and it's difficult for users to contribute improvements. 
We propose to use workflow and software tools developed and proven for open source software development- GitHub- to open up the PG corpus to maintenance and use by libraries and librarians. 
The result- GITenberg- will include MARC records, covers, OPDS feeds and ebook files to facilitate library use. Version-controlled fork and merge workflow, combined with a change triggered back-end build environment will allow scaleable, distributed maintenance of the greatest works of our literary heritage.  
Description 
Libraries need metadata records in MARC format, but in addition they need to be able to select from the corpus those works which are most relevant to their communities. They need covers to integrate the records with their catalogs, and they need a level of quality assurance so as not to disappoint patrons. Because this sort of metadata is not readily available, most libraries do not include PG records in their catalogs, resulting in unnecessary disappointment when, for example, a patron want to read Moby Dick from the library on their Kindle. 
Progress 
43,000 books and their metadata have been moved to the git version control software, this will enable librarians to collaboratively edit and control the metadata. The GITenberg website, mailing list and software repository has been launched at https://gitenberg.github.io/ . Software for generating MARC records and OPDS feeds have already been written.
Background 
Modern software development teams use version control, continuous integration, and workflow management systems to coordinate their work. When applied to open-source software, these tools allow diverse teams from around the world to collaboratively maintain even the most sprawling projects. Anyone wanting to fix a bug or make a change first forks the software repository, makes the change, and then makes a "pull request". A best practice is to submit the pull request with a test case verifying the bug fix. A developer charged with maintaining the repository can then review the pull request and accept or reject the change. Often, there is discussion asking for clarification. Occasionally versions remain forked and diverge from each other. GitHub has become the most popular sites for this type software repository because of its well developed workflow tools and integration hooks. 
The leaders of this team recognized the possibility to use GitHub for the maintenance of ebooks, and we began the process of migrating the most important corpus of public domain ebooks, Project Gutenberg, onto GitHub, thus the name GITenberg. Project Gutenberg has grown over the years to 50,000 ebooks, audiobooks, and related media, including all the most important public domain works of English language literature. Despite the great value of this collection, few libraries have made good use of this resource to serve their communities. There are a number of reasons why. The quality of the ebooks and the metadata around the ebooks is quite varied. MARC records, which libraries use to feed their catalog systems, are available for only a subset of the PG collection. Cover images and other catalog enrichment assets are not part of PG. 
To make the entire PG corpus available via local libraries, massive collaboration amoung librarians and ebook develeopers is essential. We propose to build integration tools around github that will enable this sort of collaboration to occur. 
  1. Although the PG corpus has been loaded into GITenberg, we need to build a backend that automatically converts the version-controlled source text into well-structured ebooks. We expect to define a flavor of MarkDown or Asciidoc which will enable this automatic, change-triggered building of ebook files (EPUB, MOBI, PDF). (MarkDown is a human-readable plain text format used on GitHub for documentation; MarkDown for ebooks is being developed independently by several team of developers. Asciidoc is a similar format that works nicely for ebooks.) 
  2. Similarly, we will need to build a parallel backend server that will produce MARC and XML formatted records from version-controlled plain-text metadata files.
  3. We will generate covers for the ebooks using a tool recently developed by NYPL and include them in the repository.
  4. We will build a selection tool to help libraries select the records best suited to their libraries.
  5. Using a set of "cleaned up" MARC records from NYPL, and adding custom cataloguing, we will seed the metadata collection with ~1000 high quality metadata records.
  6. We will provide a browsable OPDS feed for use in tablet and smartphone ebook readers.
  7. We expect that the toolchain we develop will be reusable for creation and maintenance of a new generation of freely licensed ebooks.

The rest of the proposal is on the Knight News Challenge website. If you like the idea of GITenberg, you can "applaud" it there. The "applause' is not used in the judging of the proposals, but it makes us feel good. There are lots of other interesting and inspiring proposals to check out and applaud, so go take a look!

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