Dear Friend,
The information below is about something so important, so innovative, so
potentially life-changing, that I just have to share it with you!
The Ellen G. White Estate has embarked on its largest project ever. Our goal is to make available on the Internet every known translation of an Ellen White
book! Beyond this, we plan to aggressively pursue translating Ellen White books
into other languages that have none as yet. With world conditions as they
are, this must happen now!
Exciting? I thought you would agree that
this is a project that is long overdue. For years those who relentlessly
attack Ellen White and the Seventh-day Adventist Church have used the Internet
to do so. It's way past time for us to recapture the power of the Internet
for the Lord!
The White Estate's new state-of-the art Web site currently under development will also contain many other resource materials about the prophetic ministry of
Ellen White and the early history of the Seventh-day Adventist
Church. These materials will be added as quickly as funds are available for
scanning and digitizing them. Equally important, we plan to translate many
of these resources into languages other than English, to provide background
information and answers to questions for Internet users worldwide.
To learn more about this and other exciting White Estate projects, please see our Partners brochure: www.whiteestate.org/partnerbrochure.pdf. After prayerfully reading it, if you want more information,
feel free to call the White Estate at 301-680-6557.
You can invest in the future of
our church by becoming a partner with the White Estate in this cutting edge
project, or in any of the other projects mentioned on the donation card found
at: www.whiteestate.org/donationcard.pdf. If there is a particular language or book
title that you would specifically like to sponsor, please let us
know.
To make a tax deductible donation to the White Estate's
global internet project, please choose one of the following three convenient
methods:
1. Mail your donation check made payable to
the Ellen G. White Estate, Inc. In the memo line indicate: Internet Project. Our
address is:
Ellen G. White Estate
Internet Project
12501 Old
Columbia Pike
Silver Spring, MD 20904-6600
2. Phone our toll free number,
1-800-WHT-DISC (1-800-948-3472), to speak with a White Estate staff member about
a credit card donation.
3. Fax your donation card directly to the
White Estate office, 1-301-680-6559.
4. Online http://partner.egwwritings.org
All of us at the White Estate want to thank you for
prayerfully considering partnering with us on one of the most important projects
ever undertaken by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Yours toward a finished
work,
James R. Nix
Director
P.S. Interested
in knowing specific details? On the average it costs $1,200 to scan, digitize,
and tag each Ellen White book for the Web site project. The process of
preparing a book for our Web site is quite involved:
- First, the non-English Ellen White book has to be
acquired and an index catalog created.
- If it is not a rare book, it is then cut and
scanned. Otherwise the book has to be scanned by hand, a much longer
process.
- The electronic copy is then sent for digitization using
optical character recognition (OCR). The OCR version is double proofed
for accuracy and index tags are added for Title, Chapters, page numbers, Bible
references, links to references in other Ellen White books,
etc.
- The resulting product is then passed through several
macros to check consistency and look for errors, after which it is imported
into an SQL database.
The benefits of having all Ellen White books in one database
are enormous. As electronic book formats change or new products come to the
market, we can create a new export filter to meet these changing needs. The
White Estate can now support several common book formats: HTML, XHTML,
XML, PDF, RTF, ePub, Mobipocket LBK, Stanza, Folio FFF, etc. These various
formats can then be used for the Web, computers, mobile phones, e-readers,
printed books, etc. This enables the White Estate to adapt quickly to meet
the needs in a wide variety of e-book formats.
By using the highest standards in our digitization project,
we are preserving the accuracy of the Ellen G. White books and ensuring that
they will be available in multiple formats as technology
changes.