We should get a system in production for scanning, OCRing, proof-checking, uploading, and subdividing previous works on mathematics into the PlanetMath database.
--jcorneli
Now that I got back to the "Lost Ark Books", the is at least the beginning of preliminaries to this project. However, while browsing the net, I noted that there is a major change since the last time — nowadays Jstor and Google have made lots of books available online. The former is a closed service, only available to people at subscribing institutions, so they are not of much use and we would need to obtain our own copies ot books which they offer. Google has made a lot of old books available to the general public and has made a good number of them which are in the public domain because they were published before 1923 available as graphics files in PDF format. Thus, for old books, we can start at the OCR step. As for more recent books, we first need to figutre out which ones are in the public domain either because their copyrights had not been renewed or for other reasons, which is the goal of the Lost Ark project.
--rspuzio