Impact In 2001, Powell became secretary of state
under President George W. Bush. His four-year
tenure in the position was marred by constant
squabbling with more conservative members of the
president’s cabinet. Further, his public image was
damaged when, in an attempt to convince the United
Nations Security Council to declare war against Iraq
in 2003, he asserted that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction, a claim later proven to be false.
Further Reading
DeYoung, Karen.Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell.New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Powell, Colin, with Joseph E. Persico.My American
Journey. New York: Random House, 1995.
Steins, Richard.Colin Powell: A Biography. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Laurence W. Mazzeno
See also Bosnia conflict; Bush, George H. W.;
Cheney, Dick; Clinton, Bill; CNN coverage of the
Gulf War; Cold War, end of; Defense budget cuts;
Don’t ask, don’t tell; Elections in the United States,
1996; Gulf War; Noriega capture and trial; Schwarz-
kopf, Norman; Somalia conflict; Wolfowitz, Paul.
Project Gutenberg
Definition Text digitization project
As a pioneer nonprofit volunteer project to digitize pub-
lished works in the public domain, Project Gutenberg has
amassed a collection of tens of thousands of e-books.
Making them freely available on the Internet, it has
prompted numerous similar projects around the world and
changed the nature of publishing and libraries.
Project Gutenberg (named after the fifteenth cen-
tury craftsman Johannes Gutenberg, who revolu-
tionized the printing of books) began at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971. A
student at the school, Michael Hart, was allotted a
grant for use of a university computer and conceived
the idea of storing public domain literary works as
electronic texts freely accessible by anyone. En-
tering the Declaration of Independence as his first
document, Hart used 7-bit (Plain Vanilla) ASCII, el-
ementary coding that would allow any type of com-
puter to access materials. By 1989, Hart had suc-
ceeded in storing ten works, keying in the entries as
continuous text (not page) files.
With the development of the Internet, mush-
rooming capacity for computer storage, and mass
commercial acquisition of personal computers,
Project Gutenberg experienced a quantum ad-
vance. During the 1990’s, the project accumulated
more than two thousand electronic books, both in
English and other languages. Hart established
monthly production targets with exponential an-
nual increments: one text per month during 1991;
two per month in 1992; three in 1993; and reaching
one hundred e-books by 1994. To accelerate this
pace, Hart began to attract and coordinate a
corps of volunteers, who produced over the rest of
the decade a monthly average of about three dozen
texts.
With the collection growing, a categorization of
holdings was devised: reference literature for ency-
clopedias and dictionaries; “heavy” literature denot-
ing works of classical authors such as Dante, William
Shakespeare, and Miguel de Cervantes; and “light”
literature for works such as Lewis Carroll’sAlice’s Ad-
ventures in Wonderland(1865) or James Barrie’sPeter
and Wendy(1911). As the project entered into the
twenty-first century, it surpassed more than ten thou-
sand digitized or scanned texts, had enrolled hun-
dreds of volunteers worldwide, and spawned Guten-
berg projects in Europe, Australia, Canada, Portugal,
and the Philippines.
Impact Project Gutenberg pioneered an impres-
sive innovation. Nonetheless, by the following de-
cade, e-books had become a commonplace of pub-
lishing and reading. The Google search engine
enterprise initiated a project to scan millions of
books from the world’s leading libraries. Commer-
cial enterprises, such as NetLibrary, offered full-text
retrieval of books still in copyright. Full-text retrieval
of articles from scholarly journals began with JSTOR
(University of Michigan) and Project MUSE (The
Johns Hopkins University). E-texts have definitively
changed how publishers and libraries produce,
store, and make accessible the printed word.
Further Reading
Fairhead, Elizabeth. “The Final Workshop of the
Gutenberg-e Project.”Perspectives on Histor y44,
no. 5 (2006): 12-15.
Hans, Paula J. “Project Gutenberg Progresses: This
Resource, Developed in 1971, Has Experienced686 Project Gutenberg The Nineties in America