Back in November, I think it was, Mudcat was down for several days, so I started looking around for something else to do on the Internet. I remembered I had recently looked at Project Gutenberg—probably when I went there in search of some song lyrics—and had seen a message:

Did you know that you can help us produce ebooks by proof-reading just one page a day? Go to: Distributed Proofreaders

Well, I did, and I signed on as a volunteer proofreader, and now I've proofread over 400 pages of text.

Project Gutenberg is a collection of over 20,000 eBooks—electronic books that you can download, read, search, copy, analyze, quote from, distribute—all free. They are all books that are out of copyright, meaning, they are mostly published before 1923.

Today I started working on volume 3 of F. J. Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads"—which is why I thought it was high time I let Mudcatters know what I was up to.

Some other books I have worked on:
--Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland (begun by John Mackay Wilson in 1834)
--The Orkney Book (John Gunn, 1909)
--Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories (Robert Ford, 1904)
--The Myth of Hiawatha (Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 1856. This was Longfellow's source.)
--A Dissertation on Slavery (St. George Tucker, 1796)