Help Wanted

If you decide that having the most important public domain Christian Classic books on the Internet is a goal you are willing to contribute some of your time toward, here are some volunteer tasks you might be able to take on.

Unfortunately, I don't have much time for training or supervision of volunteers, so you will have to select your own project and be self-motivated and able to figure out what needs to be done from the brief descriptions here.

Format a book

You could format a book in Microsoft Word that is currently only available as a text file. The formatting involves applying paragraph styles appropriately, handling footnotes, etc. When the book is formatted in Word, it can be saved in RTF format and automatically converted to HTML, text, postscript, etc. Guidelines are available.

Type a book

I will send you a photocopy of a good public-domain book. You type it and send back the electronic version. Some good projects waiting to be done: Richard Baxter, Jonathan Edwards, Murray, F.B. Meyer, An Unknown Christian, Gregory the Great (Morals), many more... Your time as a typist will be best used by typing something that wouldn't scan well.

Scan a book

If you have a scanner and OCR software, I could again send you a photocopy of a book to work on. After scanning and OCR, you could spell-check the book, format it, and print it out. Read the printout, circling anything that doesn't seem right, and make corrections by referring to the original. Mail the electronic version to me.

Be sure to verify that the work is no longer in copyright before proceeding. If you scan a work that is not in the public domain, your work will have been wasted (not to mention illegal). Works published 75 years ago or more are public domain in this country.

Bibliographic Research

I have a working list of books I'd like to have on the CCEL. You could search for particular, public domain editions of the books mentioned via on-line library searches and send me the information, so that I can request the books by Inter-Library Loan.

You could also search for these books on the internet -- no doubt some are already available. If you want to go one step further, download the book, format in Microsoft word according to these guidelines, export in RTF format, and mail the result to me for easy adding to the CCEL.

Provide links for the WWSB

If you know of a source of (high-quality, classic, stable) items that should be linked into the World Wide Study Bible, especially commentaries or sermons by well-known people, create a database import file according to the specifications and mail it to me. I am most interested in large collections of links, not single links; also, they should be time-tested classics rather than new works that you have written.

Author Biographies

Find a public domain reference source and prepare a biography of one page or less of some of the authors on the list in HTML. If you find more extensive biographical information from a trusted source that you wish to include, link it from the 1-page biography. Some suggested sources include an old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published before 1922, the @Catholic Encyclopedia, or your local library.

Specific Needs


@Harry Plantinga
This document (last modified February 05, 1998) from the Christian Classics Electronic Library server, at @Wheaton College