What would you like to see in a gitenberg website?

[Eric Hellman]

A team of CS seniors from Stevens Institute of Technology will be working on the gitenberg website (https://www.gitenberg.org), with the goal of exploring how best to expose the Project Gutenberg corpus.

What would you like to see from such a website?

I thought it would be interesting to do full-text search; Google Books does that, but perhaps others on the list have interests/frustrations.

I also thought it would be interesting to link to derivative versions- Standard Ebooks, Recovering the Classics, Librivox, etc.

Eric Hellman
President, Free Ebook Foundation
Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/
https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
twitter: @gluejar

[Waldir Pimenta]

That's nice news :)

I think the most important things to have on the website are (1) a feed of recent changes (mailing list posts, github discussions / commits / releases, tweets, etc), and (2) a set of very well defined tasks that new contributors could get their feet wet with. Notice how the "get involved" page currently contains generic items like "Choose a book you'd like to edit > Edit it" and "Fork this site and submit pull requests". Items like those are pretty much meaningless to newcomers to the project (they don't really get them any actionable path to getting involved), and those who are already involved don't need that information either. Registering the Gitenberg project in Up For Grabs and MunGell/awesome-for-beginners would be helpful in this regard.

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

I think doing a full-text search would definitely be an interesting and challenging exercise. I recommend Solr (but I am committer and am biased :-) ). If they do choose to do that, I would strongly recommend they do it very much in the open with Github repos for schemas and blog writings about the approach chosen.

On a similar project idea, I would love a cross-book character/place cross-referencing. So, if a particular real or imagined character is mentioned in different books, it could be fun to recommend/graph other books related to that. E.g. Moscow, Casanova, etc.

Regards,

   Alex.