The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, web-based electronic publishing initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to promote open dissemination of knowledge and information. A pilot version of the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) was available online in September 2002, with 32 course materials of MIT. In September 2003, the site was officially launched with several hundred course materials. In March 2004, 500 course materials were available in 33 different topics. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year. In November 2005, the MIT launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) as a collaboration of educational institutions creating a broad body of open educational content using a share model. One year later, the OCW Consortium included the courses of 100 universities worldwide.
2004: PROJECT GUTENBERG EUROPE
[Overview]
In January 2004, Project Gutenberg spread across the Atlantic with the launching of Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental cultural and educational project located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe is a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all European languages. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages. Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book in May 2005 and its 500th book in October 2008. DP Europe operates under "life +50" copyright laws. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
In 2004, multilingualism became one of the priorities of Project Gutenberg, like internationalization. Michael Hart went off to Europe, with stops in Paris, Brussels and Belgrade. In Belgrade, he met with the team of Project Rastko, to support the creation of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (launched in December 2003) and Project Gutenberg Europe (launched in January 2004).
The launching of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko was indeed a very important step. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders and is dedicated to the proofreading of books for Project Gutenberg Europe. Since the very beginning, DP Europe has been a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. DP Europe was available in 12 languages in April 2004 and 22 languages in May 2008.
The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all the European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide books for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries. The goal is for every country to have its own digital library (according to the country copyright limitations), within a continental network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for the whole planet).
A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalyzed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register). Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe.
In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its 100th book. In June 2005 Project Gutenberg Europe was launched with these first 100 books. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread books in numerous languages. Created in 1991 and widely used since 1998, Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any language, contrary to the much older ASCII that was meant only for English and a few European languages.