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From: phr@netcom.com (Paul Rubin)
Subject: WTBuy/Borrow/Rent: very old English/<whatever> dictionaries
Message-ID: <phrD2yLr1.5po@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 11:40:13 GMT
Lines: 49
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:34741 comp.ai.nat-lang:2709

I'm trying to obtain some out-of-copyright translating dictionaries
with the idea of scanning them and publishing them to the net or on
CD-ROM.  Out-of-copyright basically means dictionaries published
before 1920 or so, depending on the country of publication.
By "translating dictionary" I mean French-English/English-French, etc.

Distribution would be by the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit
charitable foundation mainly known for the GNU software project but
which has also gotten interested in dictionaries.  Everything
published by the Foundation can be freely copied by anyone without any
royalties, so any help received will go directly to benefit computer
users and language buffs everywhere, not just to some random
entrepreneurial scheme.

I'm willing to pay reasonable prices for dictionaries whose interior
pages are in generally good condition (I don't care at all what
condition the covers are in; in fact with dictionaries that I buy, I
will probably cut off the covers and binding for ease of scanning).
But I can't afford rare, collectable editions or anything like that
and that's not what I'm looking for.  I don't mind borrowing or
renting semi-expensive volumes and taking responsibility for their
care, if anyone is willing to lend them.  But I don't want to take
responsibility for extremely valuable rare books so I wouldn't want to
borrow these.

If you are in the US and are willing to donate a dictionary to this
project, the Foundation is a 501(c)3 charity, so the donation should be
tax deductable.  The same may also go if you lend us a dictionary and
waive charging "rent" (I can look into this with a tax guru if that's an
issue).  Dictionaries that I buy would be paid for out of my own
pocket, so I don't want to spend a lot, but I don't mind coughing
up what I'd expect to pay at a used bookstore for an old dictionary
that wasn't considered especially collectable.

I'm mostly interested in French and German, followed by other European
languages, and would prefer German dictionaries that use the Latin
alphabet instead of Fraktur, but will take whatever I can get.

Any volunteer help, donations or use of scanning equipment, etc.,
would also be welcome.  We already have a huge English-only dictionary
(New Century, in something like 10 volumes) that we'd like to scan.

Also, we've had rotten luck OCRing pages of old books we've scanned,
so we're looking for volunteer typists.  The idea is that we would
scan the dictionary into bitmaps and distribute the bitmaps via the
net or some other way.  Each volunteer would print out a dozen or so
pages of bitmaps, type in the text, and email it back to us.  We'd put
all the pages together and release them.  Let me know if you're
interested in helping with this.
