The Freebookapalooza
The public domain of printed books is, for me, the most important resource for teaching my classes, and it is also where I want to focus my efforts when I finally retire from my job (or get laid off... whichever comes first, ha ha). Thanks to the amazing resources at Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Sacred Texts Archive, along with other online book projects, there is a wealth of material in the world of folklore and mythology that is available in the form of full-text books online. Mythology and folklore is a field that really lends itself to these public domain resources, and the main way in which I have been curating those public domain resources for folklore and mythology is at my Freebookapalooza.
The Freebookapalooza is just a simple blog where each post at the blog is about a book online, most of which (but not all) are public domain books. For each post, I include basic information about the book along with link(s) to the book online. I also include a table of contents so that, in addition to the book title, there are also the titles of chapters/stories in the book. Most of the books I am collecting are story collections, and having those titles can be really helpful in deciding just how useful the book might be for a specific purpose. I also include an image of some kind: the book cover, an illustration from the book, or some other image that is relevant to the book's contents. I use those images in the randomizers, like in the sidebar of this blog for example.
Right now, I have 1222 books posted at the blog. My goal, in honor of the year 2019, is to get to 2019 books by the end of the year, and I've got a little reminder script to keep me on track towards that goal. Right now I'm just a little bit ahead of schedule, but not by much, as you can see in this screenshot:
The Public Domain of 2019
The reason I wanted to expand the blog this year was because 2019 was a turning point for the public domain: this year books that were published with a 1923 copyright entered the public domain! Back in 1998 Congress extended the 75 year copyright term by another 20 years, which meant that there has been a long freeze on books entering the public domain. But now we are back on track, so that books from 1923 entered the public domain this year, and next year it will be books from 1924, and so on. Of course, there are books published in 1924 and later which are not restricted by copyright, some of which are even in the public domain, such as books published with a Creative-Commons-0 license, "no rights reserved." There are also other Creative Commons licenses, plus books which publishers put online as a public service while retaining the copyright; it's a whole big beautiful world of digital books out there! So, I include a whole range of full-text books online at the Freebookapalooza, but I focus my efforts on the public domain books which can be shared and reused freely, without any limitations.
Curation Strategies
There are lots of ways to think of the curation process, and I see my work in terms of these general tasks:
Description/Annotation. A book title provides a tiny bit of description, but readers need more. In addition to just knowing about the contents of the book, readers also need a heads up about the limitations of the book, especially when it comes to pre-1924 books in the public domain where there is pervasive racism, sexism, colonialism, etc. That is a big aspect of my Brer Rabbit project this summer, so I'll have more to say about that in future posts. As an example of great description and annotation, the late, great John Bruno Hare's prefatory notes for the books at Sacred Texts are a wonderful model. In so many ways, the Sacred Texts Archive has been an ideal and inspiration for me ever since I first got online back in 1998.
Navigation. There is also a certain clunkiness in working with things that come in book form, so just helping people navigate the books is part of the process, especially since these are not necessarily books that you read from cover to cover; instead, you might just be interested in reading a few selected stories from a given book. So, what I need are not just links to the books, but links that go directly to specific stories in those books (and once again Sacred Texts Archive took this path, with books broken up into separate webpages, one page per story, each directly addressable). Ultimately, a remix system would be great; I manually created the thousands of pages in my UnTextbook a few years ago, and it was a fun experiment, but for the next iteration, I want something more flexible. I've proved the UnTextbook can be a fantastic way to approach the reading for the class, with students choosing their own reading pathways: I would like to open that up even more and make it even more configurable by the readers.
Discoverability. I see discovery as taking place through browsing, randomness, and search. I really enjoy making randomizers for the books (I'm presenting on randomizers at Domains19, whoo-hoo!), and I would like to create environments that are good for browsing. Search is also a priority, and it is a real problem too. It helps to be able to search the story titles, but not all story titles are equally revealing. Full-text search works on the book level, but not so well across books, and it also depends the accuracy of the OCR (which ranges from excellent to abysmal; again, Sacred Texts Archive, along with Project Gutenberg, are invaluable as sources of truly digitized text). Ideally, I would be writing up short synopses for the stories that would facilitate searching, with some use of keywords and other forms of tagging.
Time, Time, Time
What's hard about projects like this is that there is never enough time to do all the things you want to do. Should I spend my time finding more books to catalog? Creating active links in the tables of contents? Writing annotations and synopses?
Luckily I enjoy all of these tasks tremendously, and I've been able to take a very casual, unplanned approach to all this work over the past years since it's really just been a side hobby, with most of my efforts focused on course design, not content.
Now, though, I need to start making some real choices. I feel like I've reached my goals with course design, so henceforth I will be focusing my hobby-time on this kind of work, and I want to end up with some products of real value to me and to others. In particular, I want to create a really good Brer Rabbit Resource Book that could be repurposed and even redesigned by the user for different audiences/contexts (Brer Rabbit in an American history class would look different than Brer Rabbit in an English literature class, etc.).
I also have an idea for a "1001 Public Domain Nights" or something like that where I will pick 1001 public domain story collections, choose just one story from each collection, and weave them together into a book where each story will somehow lead to the next story and so on through shared motifs and themes. Even better: a make-your-own 1001 Nights, where each story would have keys that link to other stories and you choose what you want next: another story with a lion? about vengeance? with a happy ending? etc.
And I still want to do Star Trek Aesop where I will retell Aesop's fables using characters (and animal species) from the Star Trek universe.
Yes, these are the kinds of nerdy fantasies that I have for my retirement, ha ha.
Anyway, for the next few weeks I will just keep on messing around... but when summer comes, I really want to start getting serious and thinking about priorities and possibilities so that I can make good use of my time and find the right technology tools to be using too. I've gone a long way with spreadsheets and blogs, but the time has come for a real database and some real cms.
And I'll close with this curation graphic from the ever-inspired Silvia Tolisano at Langwitches: Blogging as Curation. I am excited about my coming summer of curation! :-)
