Gutenberg would be happy.If he were alive today, the inventor of moveable type would be pleased the project that bears his name is bringing all manner of reading materials to readers, free, through a medium he couldn’t have imagined, the World Wide Web.
Ron Huber of Penobscot Bay Watch in Rockland is using Project Gutenberg to make sure that casual readers, scientists, fisheries managers, environmentalists and anyone else with an interest can read, download or print all the historical information about the Gulf of Maine he can post to the site.
“I’m trying to get people to consider fish as wildlife that live in a habitat,” said Huber. In order to encourage such considerations, he is trying to make as much old information as possible available — documents published in the late 19th century and the early 20th century that detail the history of near-shore habitats of species such as cod and other information such as the location of weirs set up to catch runs of wild Atlantic salmon once plentiful in Maine’s rivers.
On the website of Penobscot Bay Watch, www.penbay.org, Huber has published a report of the U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries from 1929,titled “Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine,” written by agent Walter Rich. This publication includes a history and geography of the Gulf of Maine, a delineation of the individually named grounds and their locations, and maps.
“Fishing Grounds” was reprinted by the Maine Department of Marine Resources several times, most recently in 1994. The historic fisheries information contained in its pages was cited as important to his fishing knowledge by Boothbay fishing legend, Capt. Robert McClellan, who died in 1981, and later by his son, Richard, also a highline fisherman.
“The U.S. Fisheries Commission started in 1881, doing bulletins,” said Huber. “For this report, they detailed information contributed by fishermen from their fishing trips to Georges Bank.”
“This book was my inspiration,” said Huber. “If you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you are or where you’re going.” In the old days, Huber says people “had ideas about what kind of bottom fish liked to live on. They described fish in psychological terms.” He set out to scan as many old documents as he could, clean them up and download them. “They thought you should treat fishermen as valid sources of information.” But he realized his website couldn’t hold all the information and it was increasingly difficult for him to clean up all the scanned documents, then edit it without missing some mistakes.
“I finally realized I needed another editor. That’s when I found Project Gutenberg. Their goal is to make available as many free books on the web as possible. They’re all volunteers,” said Huber.
Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org has 17,000 books on line, free for the reading or printing. All are in the public domain in the U.S. For the past year and a half, Huber has been helped by editor Joe Lowenstein, a retired physician. “He’s very good at what he does,” said Huber. “He’s very helpful and he finds the mistakes.”
Still, only five percent of Huber’s collection has gone through the Project Gutenberg process and made it to the website, including “The Salmon Fishery of Penobscot Bay and River in 1895-96” and “New England Salmon Hatchers and Salmon Fisheries in the late 19th Century.”
Despite the high-tech tools available, such as optical character reading-software, one of the problems Huber encountered was that old type in the historic documents resists easy scanning. The old typefaces, which often combine letters such as f’s and i’s, scan differently from newer, cleaner ones.
“You only get about 50 percent,” said Huber. “Even with good type, 8s look like capital Bs and 3s. That can make a big difference in statistics, and I don’t want to make any mistakes in statistics.” With only half the characters scanning correctly, the pieces must be edited and rewritten, checked and rechecked to make sure the information comes out right.
“Another big challenge is: how do you make the information accessible on the Web, given the short attention span of students,” said Huber. His solution was to break the information into stories, short files.”So far, I have 115 articles.”
Titles of some of these old-time stories are intriguing, such as “The Fish-Eating Cows of Provincetown” or “The Importance of the Black Fly to Trout” and the one about the sea serpent in Muscongus Bay. While some of the stories sound a bit whimsical, they are all based in early scientific research. The sea serpent, for instance, was something a fisherman hauled up in his net, then heaved back into the sea. Scientist Spencer Baird corresponded with the fisherman, urging him to try to haul it up again so Baird could examine it.
Less colorful, but with resonance for modern fishing issues, is a piece called “Destruction of Young Fish by Unsuitable Fishing Implements.”
“Something I like about 19th century science is the English,” said Huber. “It was very colorful and interesting. The hardest thing was going through all the information and pulling out just the Gulf of Maine stuff — the notes on Gloucester fishing are important. In 1882, they talked about a good school of cod in Ipswich Bay,” Huber said. “As the years go by, they talk about more losses of fishing schooners. And there’s a lot of information on the Nantucket whale fishery a hundred years ago.”
“Project Gutenberg is an e-book website, so they’re only interested in longer pieces,” which is why the Atlantic salmon reports are the first things on the site. These reports include information not likely to be used by modern salmon farmers, like using dead horses to raise the maggots to feed salmon at the Franklin hatchery.
Huber is looking at the possibility of putting a number of the stories together in a collection, under one title, to qualify them for inclusion on the Gutenberg site. “I’m looking at what appeals to the burning issues of our time,” Huber said. “Inshore groundfish — there are efforts going on to provide and protect critical habitat near shore. And I like to see what’s missing. We have a report from 1901 on marine protozoa from Woods Hole by Gary Calkins. He found 80 different species within 20 feet outside the Fisheries
Commission building by just dipping buckets off the wharf. Naturalists are still naming species, and he sweats over the names because he knows there’s a lot of research in Europe and they’ve named many over there. He’s challenged to find descriptions elastic enough to cover all forms so he won’t have to keep giving them new names. It’s fascinating.”
“This is important. These small forms of life are susceptible to pollution,” Huber said. “It doesn’t matter how many young cod you introduce if you don’t work with sustainability of all the things in the water.”