There are many ways that we can give back.  Now that I have some "free" time, I have gone back to doing something that I last did about 4 years ago.  That is volunteering with Project Gutenberg.  How?  Well I'm helping through their Distributed Proofreaders program.  Yes, for those of you in ADF, another DP I may use that is not what you think it is.  You can find out more about this project at: http://www.pgdp.net/c/

For those not familiar, Project Gutenberg is about saving old books and other articles of print that are out of copyright, and making them available for free as plain text or e-book formats.  To browse what they have done, go to https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page.  To make this work though, these old works have to be transferred from paper to digital.  This involves scanning the work, running through an OCR program (no, people don't type the whole thing out again unless very unlucky) and then go through various rounds of proofreading, formatting, and post processing to get them into readable formats.

To date, I have only worked on the proofreading and formatting end of things.  This is a really rewarding thing to do, and anyone can do it.  You'd be surprised what kinds of books are being worked on.  Proofreading involves actually reading, and making corrections to the document to make it match the scan.  Formatting also involves some proofreading, but is mostly focused on making the formatting of the file match what the scan shows.  In the end, you get to read some really cool stuff and see the projects published.

If you have time, even just 10 minutes a day, I have to recomend that you take a look at the Distributed Proofreaders program, and help out if you can.  A page a day over a year could easily mean hundreds of books published and not lost to the shelves of libraries.