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http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4884

CALL FOR ASSISTANCE FROM SE EUROPE

Dear friends in PG/DP community,

PROJECT RASTKO--probably the biggest slavistic e-library in Europe--will donate to its spiritual grandfather PROJECT GUTENBERG numerous e-books in 2004-2005. That's the way how to mark influence and inspiration PG made to PR, but also to fulfill "Rastko's" promise from previous years, when PG team also showed its compassion with all suffering people of former Yugoslavia, through the voices of Pietro Di Miceli and Michael S. Hart.

Luckily, after all local wars and revolutions, recent evolving of "Rastko" gave us opportunity to contribute not just Serbian books to PG, but it could be impressive package of few dozens of books in plenty of European languages (both Slavic and non-Slavic: Serbian, Albanian, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian, Tzintzarian, Russian, Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, German, Goranian etc).

It was nice part of the story. Enters the problem.

CALL FOR ASSISTANCE

"Rastko's" network is spreading rapidly all over the Europe, but parallely we are helping 32 ethnocultural minorities in the Balkans to establish their own independent "Rastkos" in 2004-2005, preserving their language and identity in often poor, hostile or IT-illiterate surroundings (anyone from truly multicultural and multiconfessional country can recognize strategic social importance of preserving minority cultures and less-spoken languages in very turbulent epoch of globalism).

It means that in 2004 we'll have hundreds of new authors and volunteers all over the Europe which we cannot technically coordinate in previous organizational and technical manners. There is only one way: "Distributing Proofreaders"-like software which we are projecting (although, not for "vanilla plain ASCII" but for academic multilingual projects in dynamic environment).

The catch 22 is that we are in lack of time/resources now, so there are three logical and immediate measures:

1) To give "Rastko's" half-done public domain books in Western languages to be done in DP proofreading community.

2) To encourage "Rastko's" non-Western local communities to enter in DP circle in order to make their own language DP circles.

3) To ask DP developers to help "Rastko" in adapting DP technology to suit academic and multilingual "Rastko's" needs (for cases which differs from "Gutenberg" public domain policy).

***

Please, respond to this call with all your knowledge and possibilities, bearing in mind also specific needs of "Rastko's" network which is roughly mentioned in second part of the call.

Sincerely from Belgrade,

For PROJECT RASTKO Zoran Stefanovic, president zstefanovic@rastko.org.yu _____________________________ _____________________________

"RASTKO'S" PHILOSOPHY (WHICH IS PARTIALLY DIFFERENT FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG):

WHAT IS RASTKO: non-profit, non-governmental academic network of e-libraries (for now, mainly South-East and Central Europe) for arts and humanities--sharing common structure, interface, goals and resources. The project is mostly voluntarily in all aspects. It originates from Serbian local project developed in 1994-1997, but now it is quickly evolving into supranational and supraregional, having or developing "regional centers" (subnetworks) in 18 European and 2 Asian countries. Portal Rastko.net will be set soon, serving the needs of international network (local domain www.rastko.org.yu will remain to serve local communities in former Yugoslavia).

MAIN GOALS AND PRINCIPLES: to give FREE scientific and cultural materials to regional and global public as much as it is possible (both copyrighted and in public domain). This goal is crucial factor for transitional, poor or warring countries, whose scientists, students and general readers regularly don't have enough money to publish or buy local or regional books for their educational or professional needs. Second factor is that circulations of the local printed books are symbolic (average in the Balkans: 500 hard-copies), so often it's not possible to obtain even monograph which has been printed two years ago in neighboring country or province.

MEMBERS: Specialized institutions like academies, universities, institutes, NGO-s, publishers; as well as individuals: professional scientists and artists as authors, and amateurs as technical volunteers. All main bodies are headed by internationally recognized scientists and other experts.

COPYRIGHT STATUS: Although free for use, 80-99% "Rastko's" articles and books are copyrighted (the percent differs, depending of subcenter), but with non-exclusive and no-fee permission by copyright holders. Note that in most cases local copyright laws in Europe heavily differs from US or UK for various reasons (50 years instead of 70 etc).

FORMATS: HTML/PHP, XML, PDF, etc.

LANGUAGES: since we have dozens of languages with complex content--we must be anti-ASCIIsts, switching mainly to UTF-8 and dynamic environment; [we are just converting our old archives which are mostly win-1251 (Cyr) and win-1250 (CEE)].

AUTONOMY OF THE REGIONAL CENTERS: Developing their academic/research/social goals, regional centers of PR (or their institution-members) use volunteers' help extensively--but they have essential right to use projects in manner they think is most desirable (although, in almost every case even rigidly copyrighted material soon becomes free for global users or specific communities).

[Note: It would be sociologicaly interesting to see if DP community would contribute for the cases which differs sometimes from PG philosophy of using public domain or free content, but it's not less important--considering the value of "Rastko's" philosophy for non-western cultures or minorities.] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

DISCLAIMER--RECENT LOCAL HISTORY, ETHNIC TENSIONS AND "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS": Since "Rastko" is not afraid to publish materials about the hottest issues in European history, we have to clarify some principles to newcomers. First, we are not CNN and we don't believe in "political correctness". We had recently to many wars in the region so we are cynical enough toward any ideology. Second, we believe in academic combination of plain, rough truth and good intentions. Scientists and other authors of "Rastko" are free to express their opinions. "Rastko" will have more and more balance as it is including more and more ethnic cultures, comparing their local scientific truths and having discussions of it. This will cure in the future even the most one-sided opinion in the "Rastko", and sum of knowledge itself should eventually liberate us. This liberation of sick history is one of "Rastko's" ultimate goals, even if the process should last next 100 years. Or indefinitely.

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