Almanackan Ab

Almanac for Business. Customize the ad-free edition of the 2021 Farmers’ Almanac with YOUR company’s name on the front and back cover! It’s perfect for. Noun an annual publication containing a calendar for the coming year, the times of such events and phenomena as anniversaries, sunrises and sunsets, phases of the moon, tides, etc., and other statistical information and related topics. Almanac, book or table containing a calendar of the days, weeks, and months of the year; a record of various astronomical phenomena, often with climate information and seasonal suggestions for farmers; and miscellaneous other data. An almanac provides data on the rising and setting times of the Sun.

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Danish novels

Project Runeberg aims to cover the literature of the Nordiccountries or Scandinavia, but to be honest, most of our content isSwedish. This year, however, we have improved in the area of Danishnovels by authors such as:Herman Bang,Carit Etlar (Carl Brosbøll),J. P. Jacobsen,Aage Madelung,Carl Møller, andFanny Suenssen.

Our 28th anniversary

Project Runeberg was founded on December 13, 1992.

Looking forward to Public Domain Day

Copyright lasts for the author's lifetime and then for 70 fullyears (life+70), meaning that January 1st (Public Domain Day) is whenit expires for those who died 70 whole years earlier. On January 1st,2021, this happens to authors who died in 1950. So who are they? Oneeasy way to find out is our list ofNordic Authors.

Among them are Nobel Prize winnersGeorge Bernard Shaw (1925) andJohannes V. Jensen (1944), butin the case of Shaw we also have to consider when the translators died.Other notable names areHarry Blomberg,Anna Branting,Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan!),Ida Bäckman,Ewald Dahlskog,Ossian Elgström,Grenville Grove,Swedish king Gustav V,B. Rudolf Hall,Thorsten Jonsson,Martin Lamm,translator Wendela Leffler,Eva Neander,Ellen Nordenstreng,Oscar Olsson,George Orwell,Gösta Oswald, andEster Ståhlberg.

Since we do digitize journals that are 70 years old, some of themalready include articles by these authors, such asthis 1946 article by Shaw aboutH.G. Wells in Bonniers litterära magasin, translated toSwedish by the journal's editorGeorg Svensson (1904-1998).

Looking back at the 1949-ers

On January 1st, 2020, copyright expired for authors who died in 1949,including Nobel Prize winnersMaurice Maeterlinck (1911) andSigrid Undset (1928). By far, ourgreatest effort this year have gone into Sigrid Undset and Swedishwriter Elin Wägner.

It is remarkable, that we have no works byVilhelm Ekelund, one of Sweden'smost prominent writers. He is, however, wellrepresented at Litteraturbanken.By Anna Lamberg Wåhlin we haveno books, but many translations and articles in the journalOrd och Bild that her husband edited.

We now have several works byJoel Haugard,Aage Madelung, andAxel Munthe,some byErnst Enochsson,A. Stefan Gustafsson,Akke Kumlien,Ernst Newman,Håkan Theodor Ohlsson, andErnst Westerberg,but none yet byJohan Harald Kylin,Siffer Lemoine,Gustaf Reinius,Ansgar Roth,Storm P.,Nils Evert Taube,Eva Wahlenberg, orKarolina Widerström.

It was fun while it lasted,
but there is a time for everything.

I founded Project Runeberg in December 1992, 28 years ago,and has managed it almost single-handedly since then. It was an earlyprototype of what the Internet could be used for, what a website couldlook like, how a collaborative volunteer (crowdsourcing) project couldbe organized. It has inspired others to start their own websites, ithas inspired literature scholars and librarians to digitize books, ithas inspired some aspects of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Some people will remember how I also started a wiki website,'susning.nu', in October 2001, how it was closed to editing in April2004, and how it vanished entirely some time later. Project Runeberghas now reached a similar point where it is closed tocontributions. Perhaps it will reopen later, but not in the sameshape. Luckily, the risk of it vanishing entirely is much smaller, butshould not be neglected.

Project Runeberg has not been the same all of the time. It startedout as a few text files on a Gopher and FTP server. The web (HTTP)server was added after about a year. When the project was six yearsold, I started to scan books as facsimile images of entire pages,instead of just presenting the resulting text. Some years later, justafter the turn of the millennium, online proofreading through awiki-like web form was added. Daily statistics of our growth date backto the fall of 2003. In 2005, Project Runeberg started to use UTF-8characters for new books. The existing collection was converted toUTF-8 in 2012. Until circa 2010, the majority of books were scanned inblack-and-white TIFF G4 format. Later, color JPEG has dominated.

From the beginning, Project Runeberg presented small poems and songtexts. The first longer poems and complete novels came in the firstyears, as did the full text of the Bible in the Swedish translation of1917. Among the first works in facsimile were the collected works in14 volumes of Viktor Rydberg.The very first years of Wikipedia (and also susning.nu) coincide withthe years (2001–2003) when I scanned the the Swedishencyclopedia Nordisk familjebok (twoeditions, 20+38 volumes, 1876–1926), which was followed in2004–2008 by the Danish encyclopedia Salmonsens konversationsleksikon (26 volumes,1915–1930). Later, new genres such as complete years of journalsand more than a hundred dictionarieshave been added.

The first decade of the millennium was also the time when Googleannounced their intention to scan many millions of books in a decade(Wikipedia:Google Books), followed by similar declarations from nationallibraries in France and Norway. It was clear, that book scanning wasnow a big thing, no longer an experiment. In Sweden, literaturescholars started Litteraturbanken in 2004.

Wikipedia was growing more mature, and in 2007 I helped to organizethe Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Sverige. I was a boardmember for the first five years (2007–2012). During this time I wasalso an active contributor to Wikipedia and some of its sisterprojects: Wikisource and Wiktionary. Wikisource is indeed a direct parallel to Project Runeberg, abook scanning and proofreading project. Maybe I could hope thatWikisource would replace Project Runeberg, just like Wikipedia hadreplaced susning.nu? I gave that thought a serious consideration in2010–2011, but found it far easier to add and proofread books inProject Runeberg than in Wikisource. Wikisource is one project inSwedish, one in Norwegian and another one in Danish language, eachhaving very few active contributors in 2020. Only larger languageslike English, French, Italian and German have succeeded in buildingactive communities of contributors.

If Project Runeberg were to continue after 2011, it would need toreinvent itself. Some of the software needed to be redesigned and areliable source of funding would be necessary. To find out what couldand needed to be done, I applied for and received a grant from theSwedish Internet Foundation. During 2012 I attended the annualWikimania conference in Washington DC and also took the time to visitthe Internet Archive's scanning center at the University of Torontoand to meet in New York with Greg Newby, head of Project Gutenberg.To my disappointment, there was far less direction and coordination inbook digitization than I had hoped to find. It seemed to me that everyproject was working on the funding they could hope to find to justrandomly digitize whatever books they could find, in the vague hopethat someone would find them interesting to read at some later date.There was no demonstrable use or benefit from book scanning that coulddirectly motivate investments. This was a depressing insight.

I gave up hope of finding reliable funding for a 'real' project andinstead purchased a new scanner with support from Wikimedia Sverige.I had collected some books that I could scan and I did so, just addingvolume to the existing Project Runeberg, without rewriting anysoftware. Several volunteers teamed up to help in this effort, bothscanning books, importing books scanned by others, and proofreading.But nobody volunteered to improve the software or repair the brokenweb forum or wiki. This was the end of Project Runeberg's slow growthof 50,000 pages per year (2006–2011) and the beginning of 250,000pages per year (2012–2020). While these numbers seem like a greatsuccess, it was still a continued period of stagnation in technicaldevelopment.

(Was there a conflict of interest, when the board I had just leftin 2012 gave me support to buy new equipment? I see it the other wayaround: I provided that organization with an opportunity to show howthey supported successful scanning of books, that are useful to theorganization's purpose, to improve Wikipedia, for a rather smallamount of money. Both as a board member and when scanning books, Ivolunteered my time without salary or compensation. I'm more worriedthat nothing useful came from the grant I received from the SwedishInternet Foundation.)

In a few years at the beginning of the millennium, new technicalfunctions had been added to Project Runeberg at a fast pace. Not onlycould we upload and proofread books, check the editing history,compare versions of a text page, and get daily statistics on growth.The codes or markup used when proofreading evolved into a language ofits own, similar to HTML but not entirely, with its own syntax fortable layout and poetry. There were also ways to index books, to editthe presentation of the books, to upload new versions of bad scans, tocut out illustrations from book pages and upload them separately.Added to this was our own wiki and a web forum. In all cases, thesefunctions were implemented as rapid prototypes based on a quick idea,and never to any written specification, with any unit tests or withany security considerations.

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I developed some of these functions, but not all of them. And myhelpers soon left the project without documenting their features ortheir limitations. Some volunteer proofreaders learned how to usethem, but nobody knew how to repair them when something wentwrong.

Some proofreaders wanted to do more than the markup language couldoffer, and invented ways to use table layout code for things likecentered headings, hanging indent and side margin notes. Well, isn'tthat great, it looks nice and solves the problem, doesn't it? Theproblem is that we are supposed to proofread the text of the book, andif a reader spots an OCR error, he or she should be able to correctthe error. When opening the proofreading form, there should be thetext and not a rat's nest of markup code for table syntax. Markupalways needs to be minimalistic.

Among the security considerations left out is the ability tomonitor and revert abuse. Wikipedia has developed very advancedfeatures for this, and as a side effect they are also available toWikisource. Pages can be locked for certain categories of editors,editors can be blocked from editing, any edit will be listed in anedit history, and can easily be reverted by an administrator. ProjectRuneberg has no such roles of editors, no hierarchy of administrators.Essentially, all edits are anonymous. Edits to text pages duringproofreading are properly logged in a history and can be reviewed, butthere is no quick revert function. Edits to scanned images are notlogged at all. Who did what? Nobody knows.

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For a project to continue like Project Runeberg in the 2010s, allvolunteers must be careful and only use the existing functions withmoderation. The project is very vulnerable to attacks. Intentionalabuse can quickly get out of hand. This is what happened to susning.nuin 2003 and 2004, and led to the site being closed to editing.Fortunately, Project Runeberg has had no cases of intentional abuse,which is amazing. But in a handful of cases, there have been overlyenthusiastic proofreading volunteers, who can't accept that someundocumented functions (separate uploading of illustrations) havestopped working or that they aren't allowed ot use table markup codeto make prettier text pages, or who repeatedly do clumsy mistakes thatcan only be corrected by the only inside administrator (which is me).In most cases, a simple explanation has sufficed to correct them, buta few have been very stubborn. And for me, trying to lead and developthe project, supporting such users has taken an increasing fraction ofmy own volunteer time, which is why I decided on December 18, to closethe project to editing.

We all have plenty of time to think of where this should go next.Readers can continue to read existing texts on Project Runeberg aslong as the website stays open, hopefully for ever. Volunteerproofreaders will have to find a new hobby or move to some otherproject, perhaps Wikisource. Perhaps I will reopen some of thefunctions, such as simple proofreading, after first making sure thatthey can be monitored and reverted. But I am very reluctant to spendtime on implementing a full security system with administration roles,locking and blocking.

But perhaps we need to take one step further back, and ask againwhy are we really scanning and proofreading books? Is there anyreal use or benefit to it? How can that benefit be measured, and isthere a way to use it as a source of funding?

Some of our digitized works are used a lot, such as theencyclopedias I mentioned and some dictionaries. But does it matterthat we also have indexed and proofread most of the text? I never hearany praise for this great effort, or lamentation that some other booksare not yet proofread. The national library of Norway has during the2010s digitized all Norwegian books, with good page images and rathergood OCR text, but proofread none of it. And Norway is not in a deepcrisis because of this. Maybe it's fine to just skip proofreading? TheSwedish national library has digitized far fewer of its books, andSweden is not in a deep crisis because of this. Maybe it's fine not toscan books? These are the key questions that have not yet beenanswered.

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Project Runeberg has now completed three annual fundraisers, each time raising25,000 SEK (US$ 2900), which is enough for buying new equipment andcovering expenses, but insufficient for salary to administrators andsoftware developers. Even if some software developers would volunteertheir time and skill, there needs to be a coordinator that stays onthe project and doesn't just disappear. I estimated in 2012 that areasonable project with staff and equipment could be operated on anannual budget of 1–2 MSEK (US$ 120–240 thousand). Fromwhere could we get that kind of funding, and how would we write themotivation for it?