Gutenberg:DVD Project Volunteering

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This page is for those who are interested in helping Project Gutenberg distribute its materials to people who do not have high-speed access to the Internet. We strongly encourage all potential DVD Project volunteers to become very familiar with this page and its contents before getting started.

Contents

Note to Students

In the past, individual students in India have expressed an interest in assisting Project Gutenberg by duplicating and distributing materials. While these students have expressed commendable volunteer spirit, a number of issues arise that make working directly with students quite difficult. Interested students should contact a faculty member and arrange to perform their volunteer work under the auspices of their college or university. Such an arrangement would provide assurance to Project Gutenberg that sufficient resources are available and that all of the details could be handled in an appropriate manner.

Prerequisites

Before you volunteer, please make sure that you have the following resources available:

You will also need the following supplies (more specific information is provided under the heading Note on Mailing Supplies, below):

Let Us Know

To indicate your willingness to volunteer, please send e-mail to cd_AT_pglaf.org that states your name, location, and an e-mail address that you would be willing to share with those to whom you send Project Gutenberg materials. You may not wish to use your primary email address because it will be sent to everyone to whom you mail discs.

Once we receive your information, we will send you a few requests to get started with. We will also send you a copy of the form letter that accompanies each set of Project Gutenberg materials. You will need to personalize the contact information at the bottom of the page prior to printing copies of the letter. Once you notify us that all the discs have been mailed and any problems have been resolved, we will create an account to provide you with access to the CD and DVD request tracking database.

Getting Ready

You will need to obtain an initial inventory of supplies before you can begin. If you wish to be reimbursed for your out-of-pocket expenses, you must save the receipts for your expenses and submit them for reimbursement. Otherwise, Project Gutenberg thanks you for your donation.

Where you are located and how much time you intend to donate to the project will determine the appropriate quantity of materials to purchase. Many of the necessary items are available for purchase in a variety of quantities. Often, bulk purchase lowers the per-unit price. However, laying in a multi-year supply of a particular item ties up funds that could be available for other purposes. A local office supply store, an office supply chain (such as Staples [1], Office Depot [2], or OfficeMax [3]), a discount store (like Wal-Mart [4]), or a shopping club (like Sam's Club [5] or Costco [6]) would stock the supplies necessary to get started.

Note on Mailing Supplies

If you are in the United States, you must coordinate any bulk supply purchases through cd_AT_pglaf.org. If you are outside the United States, the shipping and duty charges would likely cancel out any cost benefit that a group purchase could provide.

Project Gutenberg duplicates and distributes CD-R and DVD-R media because we have had compatibility issues with some drives with some alternative media.

Since the release of the July 2006 edition of the Project Gutenberg DVD and the change in our request system to allow people to request two copies of the DVD, the demand for copies of the CD has declined precipitously. It may make sense for new volunteers to concentrate specifically on duplicating and distributing the DVD and allow existing volunteers to distribute CDs until inventory is exhausted.

One of our U.S.-based volunteers notes that CD-R and DVD-R media and CD/DVD sleeves are available at competitive prices from Shop4Tech.com. If you visit their web site, create an account, and join their mailing list, they will send periodic e-mail announcing their special promotions. Note however that if you do not live in the United States, there are almost certainly less expensive alternative suppliers that serve your country.

Other supplies are available from DiscountOfficeSupplies.com. They too offer periodic e-mail promotions to members of their mailing list. Common supplies include the following:

You might want to obtain a small letter moistener, a sponge, or a barely damp folded up paper towel to help seal the envelopes once you have stuffed them.

Some of our higher volume volunteers choose to use mailing labels for the sake of convenience. However, this is not a requirement. You should feel free to simply write directly on the envelope if that works better for you.

If you do decide to use labels, two different sizes of mailing labels are appropriate because addresses in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and some other countries, tend to have fewer, longer, lines, while addresses in other countries tend to have more, shorter, lines.

The process of completing the customs forms manually can become quite tedious. If you are mailing a lot of discs, it might make sense to purchase a pre-inked stamp of your return address to help ease the process. Such a stamp allows one to complete the Sender's Name and Address portion of the customs form in one easy motion. A supply of 1" x 2-⅝" (25 mm x 67 mm) laser mailing labels (30 up on a page) may be useful. (These labels are available from Avery as part number 5160, and from other vendors as well.) One can copy each intendend recipient's name and address from the large mailing label for the outside of each package on to a small label used to complete the customs form. The font size on the small label can be adjusted to ensure that the intended recipient's entire address fits on the label (the font can get quite small at times). Then, after completing all 30 labels and printing that page, one can complete the Addressee's Name and Address portion of a customs form by applying the corresponding label to the form.

International Mailing from the U.S.

If you are mailing from the United States, you need to complete a customs form for each international mailing and each mailing to an APO or FPO (military) address. You can obtain a small supply of customs forms from your local Post Office, or you can order multiples of ten (up to fifty) from the USPS.com web site. Go to the Postal Store and search for Form 2976. You will need to create an account for yourself, but the forms will be shipped to you at no cost. Once you have received a shipment of customs labels, and you have your customer identifier available, you can call a toll-free number and request a larger quantity of customs forms than the Postal Service web site will allow you to order.

Burning CD and DVD Media

Using the Request Tracking Database

Once you have printed a supply of insert letters, prepared a quantity of media, and obtained a supply of envelopes, then you can assign yourself requests to complete.

As a new volunteer, you will be provided with the URL for the Request Tracking database, your enrolled e-mail address, and your assigned password. With this information, you can log in. If you have cookies enabled, you should only need to login once, but keep your password on file, just in case.

The main window presents an administrative message and a personalized greeting. The next line presents five options: Requests Awaiting Checkout, Your Checked out requests, Requests you've completed, Requests you marked not completable, and Requests you flagged for administrative attention. Requests Awaiting Checkout is selected and the list of requests waiting to be fulfilled appears below. The oldest requests are at the top of the list. If you scroll down to the bottom of the list, there are two different filters you can use to view a selected subset of the requests. You can choose to view requests for a particular media type or requests from one or more countries. When you select the desired option(s) and click the Apply Filter button, the system filters the requests and displays those that meet the specified criteria.

Next to each request is a check box. You can click the box to select the corresponding record. At the top of the page are two buttons: Select all and Select range. If you click the Select all button, the system checks the box for every visible record. If you want to select a contiguous subset of the visible records, you can check the box for the first record you want to select, check the box for last record you want to select, and click Select range. The system will check the boxes for the records in the gap between the first and last records.

After you select the records, you can click the Check Out button at the top or the bottom of the page. Doing so brings up a reminder that you should check out only as many records as you plan to process in the next few days. After you acknowledge the reminder, the records will be moved from the waiting for checkout list into your list of checked out requests.

If you click the list of Your Checked out requests, you will see each of the records you have assigned to yourself. The media type is on the top line, above the e-mail address specified in the request. If you click the e-mail address, the system will open a window in your e-mail program to allow you to correspond with the person who submitted the request. The next line has the name specified in the request and it is underlined as a link. If you click the name link, the system opens the request in an edit window so you can make corrections or add comments to the request. There is no "undo" feature, so do be careful if you use this feature.

While we ask that people take care to enter complete and accurate address information, they do not always do so. If you see an address that appears to be incomplete, take the time to respectfully ask the requestor to verify the address for you. While you wait for a response, you can add a comment to the request explaining the situation and close the request as not completable. When you receive a response, you can reopen the request, fulfill it, and close it again as complete.

If you ever encounter a request about which you have a question or problem, or a request which simply needs to be brought to someones attention, you should mark the request for administrative attention and email us.

The media type specified in each request is a guide to what media to send. However, you should verify that the comments included with the request do not contradict the requested media type.

Why we ship two discs

In the United States, postage is computed by the ounce (where one ounce is 28.3495231 grams according to Google). The weight of one disc in its sleeve, a letter, and an envelope is just more than one ounce and postage for two ounces is required to mail the package. However, the weight of two discs in sleeves, a letter, and an envelope is just less than two ounces. One disc or two, the postage in the U.S. is the same!

Recently, however, requests have come in for two copies of the DVD accompanied by the comment, "please send me a CD too." The third disc would cost additional postage, if mailed from the United States. It is up to you as the volunteer to decide how to handle these cases. If you plan to submit your expenses for reimbursement, please do not send more than two discs to fulfill each request. You may choose to honor the media specification and ignore the comment by sending two DVDs or you may choose to ignore the media specification and honor the comment by sending one CD and one DVD. If, on the other hand, you are covering the costs, then you may do as you wish, provided you send at least two discs. If you are located outside the United States, then postage in your country is most likely billed by the gram. Depending on the exact breakpoints in your country, each additional disc may increase the cost of postage. In that case, priority should be given to distributing the DVD (because it includes more material). If you need to discuss a particular request to determine if it merits exceptional treatment, please do not hesitate to contact cd_AT_pglaf.org.

Download a batch of addresses

From the Your Checked out requests page, you can download the requests as a comma-separated values (CSV) file or as a text file through one of the links provided on the page. One of these files could be used with a spreadsheet, database, or word processing software package to produce custom mailing labels through a so-called "mail merge" operation.

Validating addresses

A number of resources are available to help you address packages in a manner that will allow the Postal Service to process them most efficiently and effectively.

One per customer

Because we are a small organization, staffed solely by volunteers and funded entirely by donations, we have established a policy that we send one set of materials per person who requests them. We have some measures in place in an effort to identify and cancel duplicate requests, but if you can keep your eyes open for any we might have missed, we would appreciate it.

You are not alone

If you have any questions or if any issues arise during your volunteer service, please do not hesitate to send e-mail to cd_AT_pglaf.org. We also encourage all of our volunteers to subscribe to the DVDVol mailing list. You can do so at [7].

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