Sending books to New Thought Library

Today things have evolved quite a bit from the beginning of the library at the end of the 20th Century.

Through the wonderful insights of Dr. Avalon and the teamwork of amazing New Thought Leaders around the world, we have worked out increasingly better ways to process books and then to present those books in the library. Today we work together in a global network of compassionate professionals combining our minds to insure more efficient processing of public domain New Thought books and the production of digital formats to insure that we meet the panoply of public desires for these potent teaching.

Why should we support the digitization of books around the world?

Because of changing circumstances around the world, there is an increasing need to preserve digital texts. Even in countries that were formerly considered bastions of Liberty, we have seen book burnings and the negation of human rights rising over the last 20 years. For instance in the United States during the first decade of the 21st Century, particularly from 2000 to 2008, book burnings were occuring around the nation. Books burned include: Fiction books such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Children's books, and more. Even the U.S. Government has participated in book burning. Some churches promote book burning as part of their traditions. This behavior continues today.

It is often pointed out that only the greatest and most important writers are burned. We must all understand that burning books in order to destroy knowledge or ideas is the destruction of human culture and a display of gross ignorance. Today many feel that certain countries that were formerly considered the lighthouses of liberty, freedom and tolerance are now beacons of light warning us of impending fires of hatred which have been sparked by the slumbering sparks of ignorance. The creators of faux history are capable of their deceptions through fostering ignorance via propaganda. These Orwellian leaders are insistent on repeating the lies till one believes them. The antidote to ignorance is knowledge, when we combine knowledge with compassion, we attain wisdom.

Join us to digitize all public domain New Thought texts and insure they are preserved throughout the world via the World Wide Web.

We feel that the best way to provide a public library is online with voluntary membership and no tracking cookies so that members of communities who might be persecuted or retaliated against for reading books will have less to fear from their accessing of our archive of books.

Here are the basic steps in scanning a book so that you can send it in to this library, your library.

When books come in, they are first processed into the Primary Format. Eventually they will be in two formats: the "Primary Format" and the "Final Format".

We keep the "Primary Format" for the production of ebooks in a variety of outputs. Once books have been processed into the "Final Format", Netizens are able to target individual pages and thereby use them in classes, research, study groups and writing their own books.

With every new advance in online library science, we absorb these developments and move forward to create a better library. Our library epitomizes an insightful open source approach which ensures that within ten years we will bring at least 1 billion people to New Thought making it a major world religion.

Choosing a book ~ scanning the book ~ cropping ~ cleaning ~ zipping the pages ~ sending the book

Choosing / Finding/ Scanning a book to send in to the library

 

1. The book should be in the public domain which means that it should be at least 67 years old for books copyrighted prior to 1976.
   
   • In 2010, books first published prior to 1944 are now in the public domain.
   • if in doubt read your government's rules on copyright.
2. If you have a book in your own personal library or in the library of your Spiritual Center, that is great! If you want to find books, that are in the public domain, they are in libraries all over the world.
   • Look in your own personal collection of books
   • Look in your Spiritual Center Library
   • Look in your local Public Library
   • Look in your local University Libraries.
3. Once you have found a great book.
   
   • Check it out and scan it at home or
   • Take your laptop and a scanner to the library!
4. Scanning a book is easy.
   • Treat the book nicely, do not be rough with the book, avoid damaging old books
   • When using a flatbed scanner, you will need to test your first few scans so that you know that the scanner is working properly and make adjustments as to how you are laying the book on the scanner to insure that any particular book is being properly scanned.
   • You don't need to smash the books to scan them, find out how far you need to flatten them in order to get a good scan.
   • Once you have determined the best way to lay the book on the scanner you can begin.
5. One way to scan books is to have a scanner party at which everyone brings their scanner and a laptop and watches a movie.
   • You will need to choose a movie that everyone likes.
   • Don't provide any greasy food or food which can be dropped or smeared on the books or pages so that you will not damage the books.
   • Be sure and tell people not to drink over the books they are scanning or this could result in damage to their book or their scanner or laptop.
   • Be sure and have everything check to make sure they scanned every page of their book when they are done.
6. When you have finished scanning a book, you need to insure that you have scanned all the pages.
   • Open each scan / (picture of the page scanned) to insure it was scanned.
   • Insure the scan was a good scan. Can you read it? Did you accidently put your hand in the way? Is it straight, clear and readable?
7. Now it is time to crop the raw scans into individual pages.
   • This can be done with a variety of programs. If you are using a windows machine you can even use the Paint program which is in the Accessories folder of your programs list.
   • You will first create a new folder called "bw" in which you can place the cropped single pages.
   • Now crop each original scan into two pages, exporting them into your "bw" folder
   • After you have insured that each page of the book has its own individual picture, then it is time to check the pages to see if they need any retouching.

Processing / Cleaning up the scans so they can be OCR'd

Over the course of 67 years, some books may have been marked up or damaged. In the case of personal books, this is a choice of the owner. Books in libraries are supposed to be treated with respect and not marked up by individuals borrowing them. But some people do not know this or do not care. If the book you have scanned has age marks from foxing or deliberate damage from underlining, or other types of abuse, before it can be properly run through Optical Character Recognition, the pages must be cleaned.

1. Cleaning up the pages by retouching/painting them.
   • You clean the pages by painting away the abuse with a color that matches the background of the text.
   • Open the page in an image editing program such as Gimp, Paint, Firefox, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc...
   • Select the brush tool, then sample the background, adjust the view so that you can easily see the abuse and the text, then adjust the size of the brush so that you can paint over the abuse without painting the text.
2. Fixing up the pages using the cut and paste technique
   • In some cases pages have been so abused that it is easier to find the same words on other pages and copy and paste them onto the page that you are cleaning.
   • Find the text that you need on another page of the same book, copy the text and paste it onto a separate file by itself so you can adjust it.
   • You might need to trim it or use the eraser tool to make parts of it transparent.
   • when you are satisfied with the text to be pasted on top of the abused text, then copy it and paste it on top of the old text.
   • line up the new text so that it aligns with the old text and be sure that you are using the same word and tense as the word being replaced.
3. Fixing up the pages using the typeover technique
   • In some cases pages have been so abused that it is easier to simply retype the page.
   • In this case, keep the old page, create the new page and save it as a picture in the same format as the old page, usually a jpg, simply add an "a" to the name so that if the old page is named law_001.jpg, the new page would be named law_001a.jpg
   • Be sure and keep both pages in the folder so that the original page remains part of the folder.
     
     

Zipping the pages

Once you have cleaned the pages so they can go through OCR, you can send them to the library. You will need to create a zip folder of the files to send them in.

How to create a compressed (zip) folder using windows

If you want to create a compressed folder within another folder, go to method 1. If you want to create a compressed folder on your desktop, go to method 2.

Method 1: Use My Computer to create the compressed folder

these steps to use My Computer to create a compressed folder:

1. On your desktop, double-click My Computer, and then open the folder in which you want to create the compressed folder. For example, if you want to make a compressed folder in the root folder of drive C, double-click My Computer, and then double-click drive C to open the root folder.
   
   Note If you do not see a My Computer icon on your desktop, click Start, and then click My Computer.
2. On the File menu, point to New, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder.
3. Type a name for the new compressed folder, and then press ENTER. Your new compressed folder is displayed as a folder icon with a zipper. Depending on which folder options that you have set, a .zip file name extension may also appear.

Method 2: Create the compressed folder on the desktop or in a folder

1. Right-click a blank area on the desktop or in an open folder, point to New, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder.
2. Type a name for the new compressed folder, and then press ENTER. Your new compressed folder is displayed as a folder icon with a zipper. Depending on your preferences, a .zip file name extension may also appear.

Sending the files to the library

Give us a call so we can tell you the next step! 505.216.6397

Thank you for your help to make the library, your library the best in the world!