Mormon Texts Project – A Motley Vision

Tom Nysetvold has taken on the yeoman work of starting back up the Mormon Texts Project. He was kind enough to answer some questions about it.

Why did you decide to resurrect the Mormon Texts Project?

I somehow ran in to and read some books on Project Gutenberg (notably Joseph Smith as Scientist by Widtsoe) that had been done by the Mormon Texts Project (MTP). They led me to Ben Crowder’s MTP website, and I was very impressed with what he was doing. I got in touch with him and found out he’d recently suspended the project for lack of time to run it.

I thought it was a shame that many important Church books still weren’t (and aren’t) available, and I’ve long been interested in the ideals of open source projects, Creative Commons, etc., so I decided to do a couple of books to figure out the Project Gutenberg process and see if it was something I was interested in doing on a larger scale. I had a lot of fun doing The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt and Orson Pratt’s An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, so I decided to try and get other people involved in the same type of work, and I contacted Ben and got his permission to use the Mormon Texts Project name. A few friends and I started working, and we’re now up to ten books released on Project Gutenberg (PG) this year (seven that were previously unavailable and three that were available only on the old MTP website). At this point, 31 church books are available on PG (23 of which were produced by MTP) out of roughly 45,000 books total. I think those numbers show that as a global religion with a rich heritage, we have a long way to go before that heritage is appropriately accessible. Continue reading “Tom Nysetvold on the Mormon Texts Project 2.0”

You probably know Ben Crowder as the Editor-in-Chief of Mormon Artist magazine. But Ben is the kind of guy who always has several projects going on at one time, and I thought that one of them that he is actively working on right now — the Mormon Texts Project — would be of interest to AMV’s readers.

Could you briefly describe the Mormon Texts Project for our readers who may not have heard of it?

The goal of the Mormon Texts Project is to make out-of-copyright Mormon books available for free online, specifically in plain text through Project Gutenberg. (We chose Project Gutenberg because it’s been around for a long time and has a lot of reach.)

You are actively looking for volunteers to help with MTP. Do volunteers need to have major tech skills to help? What do they need to do/know/have?

Only basic tech skills are needed — the majority of the work our volunteers do consists of comparing a page of text to the corresponding page image, fixing formatting problems according to our MTP guidelines. An eye for detail helps, of course. Volunteers can do this on pretty much any kind of computer. (In the past we’ve emailed out the page images and page text, but we’re in the middle of switching to a web app.) Continue reading “Ben Crowder on the Mormon Texts Project”