Editing Michael S. Hart (section)

==Project Gutenberg==
{{Main|Project Gutenberg}}

During Hart's time at the University of Illinois, the computer center gave Hart a user's account on its computer system; Hart's brother's best friend was the [[Mainframe computer|mainframe]] operator and gave an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; its value at that time has since been variously estimated at $100,000 or $100,000,000.<ref name="Gutenberg_1992" /> Although the focus of computer use there tended to be [[Computer data processing|data processing]], Hart was aware that it was connected to a network (part of what would become the [[Internet]]) and chose to use his computer time for information distribution. Hart related that after his account was created on July 4, 1971, he wanted to "give back" by doing something that could be considered to be of great value. He happened to have with him a copy of the [[United States Declaration of Independence]], which he had been given at a grocery store after watching [[fireworks]] for the [[Independence Day (United States)|Independence Day]] celebration earlier that evening. He typed the text into the computer but was told that it would be unacceptable to transmit it to numerous people at once via [[e-mail]].<ref name="Gutenberg_1992" /> Thus, to avoid crashing the e-mail system, he made the [[e-text]] available for people to download.

This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg as the first [[digital library]]. Hart began posting text copies of such classics as the [[Bible]] and the works of [[Homer]], [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]], and [[Mark Twain]]. As of 1987 he had typed in a total of 313 books in this fashion. Then, through being involved in the University of Illinois PC User Group and with assistance from Mark Zinzow,<ref name="Schofield_ZD" /><ref name="Kahle" /> a programmer at the school, Hart was able to recruit volunteers and set up an [[infrastructure]] of [[mirror website|mirror sites]] and mailing lists for the project. With this, the project was able to grow much more rapidly.

The mission statements for the project were:

<blockquote><poem>"Encourage the Creation and Distribution of eBooks"
"Help Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy"
"Give As Many eBooks to As Many People As Possible"<ref name="Gutenberg_1992" /></poem></blockquote>

His overall outlook in the project was to develop in the least demanding format possible: as worded in ''[[The Chronicle of Higher Education]]'', to him, open access meant "open access without proprietary displays, without the need for special software, without the requirement for anything but the simplest of connections."<ref name="Chronicle_HighEDU" /> His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge and to do so by the end of the 20th century.<ref>{{Cite book | author1=Day, B. H. | author2=Wortman, W. A. | year=2000 | title=Literature in English: A Guide for Librarians in the Digital Age | page=[https://archive.org/details/literatureinengl00dayb/page/170 170] | publisher=Association of College and Research Libraries | location=Chicago | isbn=0-8389-8081-3 | url-access=registration | url=https://archive.org/details/literatureinengl00dayb/page/170 }}</ref>