Home > Tamil Language & Literature > Project Madurai > Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram (Project Leader) on Ninth Anniversary of Project Madurai - Pongal Day 2007

 

Dr.K.Kalyanasundaram (Project Leader) on Ninth Anniversary of Project Madurai - Pongal Day 2007:

Dear Promads: First very warm PONGAL wishes to all Promads!

Project Madurai was launched on the Pongal Day in 1998. Hence on this auspicious day we are completing 9 years and marching onto to the 10th year! Over these 9 years we have announced 266 etext releases to include well over 300 Tamil literary works : big and small, covering a large period from early sangam period to contemporary ones.

2006 has been a very productive year for Project Madurai as compared to 2005. For few years now we have Distributed Proof-Reading DP-PM initiative running. DPPM is maintained by Dr. Kumar Mallikarjunan and Dr. S. Anbumani at the Virginia Tech. Univ. VA, USA. ... The idea behind DPPM is to split up preparation of etexts into several parts. Scanned image files of printed literary works are made available online, accessible one page at a time. Thus several people can collectively work to produce the etext.

Thanks to a small group of volunteers working through DPPM, we managed to produce and release nearly 34 etexts (PM releases #228-262). ....Digital Library of India now has now etexts (as scanned image files) of over 300 Tamil literary works -at least a third of them of good quality for us to use in DPPM. In fact, late last year we started using these image files for preparation of machine readable text version of etexts. So we do have a plenty of supply of scanned image files to process. What we need is continued support to our DPPM initiative. July & August 2006 were peak periods when we have had close to 400 pages processed in each month. Alas, the tempo slowed down since then, that in December 2006, we had only 79 pages done.

We have now over 500 people subscribed to this list. But we had only a dozen Promads regularly helping us in the etext preparation. I humbly request each one of you to come forward and help us whatever we can to accelerate production of more etexts. Introduce PM to your friends and encourage them to get involved. Even if 10% of the list subscribers actively help us, we can produce more etexts.

On behalf of all of us involved in this collective exercise, I want to thank the entire ring of 500+ Promads for their continued support for Project Madurai.

anbudan
Kalyan
Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram
Project Leader, Project Madurai http://www.projectmadurai.org

 

Mail Us

- truth is a pathless land -

Home