Welcome. Below are the answers to a few common questions about the project:
Project Ben-Yehuda aims to make accessible the classics of Hebrew literature (poetry and prose at first, and then essays etc.) to the reader of Hebrew. For that purpose, the literary works are converted to a format that is readable and searchable on the Internet. The project is intended to be of use for both amateurs and scholars of literature. It is inspired by the parallel English project started by Professor Michael S. Hart (which has recently started bringing texts in other languages as well) called Project Gutenberg. Here is a link to additional information on the non-Hebrew project.
No. The project's editors take serious note of copyright laws, and only works that are in the public domain (that is, according to Israeli law, works whose authors have died over seventy years ago) are included in the project, unless express permission has been granted by copyright holders to include a work before the copyright on it has expired.
Our knowingly ambitious goal is to bring the entirety of Hebrew classics to the Internet. At this time we are working on the authors appearing in our home page. We would be happy to receive suggestions regarding the choice of texts.
A modern browser that supports Hebrew with diacritics (nikkud). Version 5.0 or later of Microsoft Internet Explorer is suitable for Windows, as are versions of Mozilla newer than 1.2, on any supported operating system. Unix users may also use the Konqueror browser, though its support of diacritics is limited, for now. You may download Internet Explorer from Microsoft's site. Mozilla is available on the Mozilla site. Macintosh users should take a look at these instructions.
We try and upload material to the site incrementally, so that most works become available as soon as possible. This means that for some works, we have not finished preparing the entire text yet. Material that is ready for viewing is linked (and colored blue, in most browsers), and material that is not ready is colored black and is not clickable.
Israeli copyright law protects works for a duration of 70 years after the author's death. This means that we cannot publish the works of these and many other authors for now, unless we get written permission from the copyright owners (heirs, publishers, or literary executors).
Manually: one of the project volunteers types it from the book and into a word processor file, which is then translated to HTML and is uploaded to the site. Most of the effort, of course, is in typing the text, and more precisely (with poetry) in adding diacritics to it.
Because image files are not searchable by a computer. A great feature of the project is the ability to find a work even if you remember only a phrase from it, but not its title or author.
First, no such software is distributed freely, and the purchase of usage licenses for all the project's volunteers would require a large sum of money. The project does not at present have external funding, and all the time and work contributed to it is that of volunteers. In addition, according to research undertaken by Asaf Bartov, there is today no OCR software supporting Hebrew with diacritics properly. Existing software gets "confused" by diacritics, making it useless for the transcription of poetry. We will happily hear of creative suggestions on this matter.
You can join as a volunteer in the project. Help usually means typing, editing, and proofreading texts. Another form of assistance to the project is to donate articles, surveys, criticism, and translations of your own, which relate to the fundamental material published here. For example, a number of translations or Rachel's poetry have appeared on the site, soon to be joined by an essay on her by the Russian poet Achmatova.
Another way to help us is to donate copies of books containing works of interest to the project. Perhaps you own old books of The Collected Writings of Achad-Ha'am, All Brenner's Stories, and the like? We need a number of copies of each work we wish to add, and not every volunteer has access to these books. Some books are hard to find even in libraries, and if you have copies you can donate or even loan us, we would be happy to receive them.
For details, please contact the project coordinator, Asaf Bartov, by electronic mail at editor@benyehuda.org.
No. The works are free for any person's use. We do ask that you aid us in spreading the word about the project, for example by citing the site's address in your academic papers if you obtain copies of texts from it.
If you have any further questions, please contact Asaf Bartov at editor@benyehuda.org.