[Feel free to forward this announcement to other relevant forums]

Everyone,

I am announcing the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a
public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of
digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

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

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

DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and
a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained
(YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)


The Purpose and Reason for DTC
------------------------------

The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is,
suprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the
various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing
"ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly
spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are
forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg
(e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set
of online-only forums.)

And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various
topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main
focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly
closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (a YahooGroup
which I administer, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-community/ .)

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

"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 subscribing to
the group, let me know. I look forward to seeing you there!


Jon Noring
The Digital Text Community Administrator
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital-text/