Everyone,

This is the second and final formal announcement in other forums on
the launch of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing
list (run on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing
"ink-on-paper" publications.

The full group description is found at the group's "home page" at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital-text/

The group was launched a month ago, and already has over 170
subscribers, including notables from a number of text digitization
projects.

Discussion is beginning to become quite active. Anyone interested in
any aspect of the digitization of texts is invited to subscribe and
participate.

I will be happy to manually subscribe those who don't want to go
through the process of getting Yahoo accounts to subscribe -- just
let me know in private email and I'll add you to the list, no muss,
no fuss!

Note that posted messages to the group are lightly moderated, intended
only to remove spam, off-topic messages, and messages whose tone or
substance violate the group's "Prime Directive" of cordiality and
respect towards others (refer to the group description for further
information on the moderation policy.)

*****

(Further info taken from the first announcement)

The primary reason why we started DTC is that there is, surprisingly,
no independent, cross-project forum to discuss the various technical
and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly
spread around in various nooks and crannies of the Internet. For
example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such
as those run by Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed
Proofreaders (they maintain a web-based forum.)

And then there are forums which touch upon various issues of text
digitization but which is not their main focus. Examples include the
The eBook Community (TeBC) and Book Futures (BF, note that I am a
moderator for both of these Yahoo-based groups.)

The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the
DTC group description:

"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."

Do consider subscribing to DTC. If you need any help with subscribing
to the group, let me know. Look forward to seeing you there!


Jon Noring
The Digital Text Community Administrator