Sunday, October 21, 2007

Moving Liberty to Cyberspace: Help Wanted

Liberty magazine currently has a web site, but the archive of past articles does not go back very far. Some of us would like to change that, to get the entire past run online and searchable. Doing so probably requires scanning in about eighty issues, OCR'ing and proofing them.

One possibility is volunteers. Another is outsourcing the job abroad, preferably to libertarians or a libertarian organization somewhere where the relevant labor is less expensive than in the U.S. If anyone is interested, let me know by email: ddfr@daviddfriedman.com.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why bother with the proof-reading? Scan them to PDF, then use Adobe Acrobat Professional to OCR them. This will preserve the mags' appearance exactly in PDF format (for reading) whilst doing a "good enough" OCR job for searching and copying and pasting of text.

If you have access to a large scanner (with a paper feed) and the mags can be cut into individual pages, then this shouldn't be more than a morning's work.

Anonymous said...

Semi-joking idea:

Post the PDFs; let Google OCR them; copy the content from google's cache into your own text-based document.

Russell Hanneken said...

Are you aware that some of Liberty's older articles are available at the Internet archive?

I've heard that Liberty's page layout was (is?) done with a program called Ready, Set, Go!. If this is true, it might be easier to extract the articles from the RSG files.

Anonymous said...

I initially misinterpreted your title: Moving Liberty to Cyberspace. My first thought was, "Makes sense; it certainly hasn't caught on here..." But I now I see you were referring to the MAGAZINE...

David Friedman said...

Anonymous comments on initially misinterpreting the title.

That, of course, was the idea.

Eric D. Dixon said...

At some point in early 1999, I burned all the Liberty text files (plain text electronic versions of all the magazine's articles from 1987 through that point in 1999) to three or four CDs, using Bill's brand-new CD burner.

It's entirely possible I burned a copy for myself, although I have no idea where it might be now. The others were stowed away there at the office somewhere.

If the hard drives that stored the old ReadySetGo! versions of the articles are damaged to the point that they no longer work, it might still be worthwhile to try paying for data recovery specialists to take a crack at them...

Isegoria said...

Might the original authors still have digital copies of their articles to (re)submit?

Charles Pooter said...

I've just discovered the Amazon Mechanical Turk system:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=15879911

Get your mags OCRed by people!