The first 25 issues of the Journal of Salesian Studies are in the process of digital republication, but we cannot do this without your support!
- Pray Please pray for the success of this project, your prayers do make a difference!
- Pledge Visit our kickstarter page & pledge your financial support
- Promote Tell you friends about this project, and post the kickstarter link on your facebook page
Find out more on our kickstarter.com project page.
The Goal:
To digitally republish past issues of the Journal of Salesian Studies (in both searchable PDF format, and online academic journal format) in order to make the Salesian spirit and charism more readily available to the Church, to academia, and to the world.
Phase 1 funding goal as been reached, let’s go for phase 2!
There are two funding goals. The first phase of the project required $2,200 in pledges. This threshold has been reached thanks you the generosity of our kickstarter backers! We can now begin the work-study program and publish the past issues in a searchable PDF format.
The second phase will make the Journal available in an online academic journal format. This will require an estimated 2-3 times the amount of labor needed for the initial publication due to the need to complete a detailed review of the accuracy of the OCR (text recognition), as well as additional editing and publication requirements. We will need to reach an estimated $5,000 to see this project all the way through to the end. Anything over the $5,000 will go toward funding the next project: the re-launch of the Journal with the publication of new articles.
The Deadline:
January 24th, the feast of St. Francis de Sales, the patron of the Salesians of Don Bosco, marks the end of the kickstarter campaign. St. Francis de Sales is not only the patron of the Salesians, but also the patron of the press and of journalism…how fitting?! One week later, January 31st marks the feast of our founder, St. John Bosco, as well as the 91st birthday of Fr. Arthur Lenti, world-renowned author of many of the Journal articles. What a great birthday present: the pledge to continue the legacy of Fr. Arthur, who has dedicated his life to the study and propagation of the Salesian spirit and charism!
Your Support Also Benefits Students in Need:
Your contribution not only supports the digital republication project, but also goes toward helping college students in need. Don Bosco Hall is home to students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. These students chose to live with the Salesian community, and the ones involved with this project would not be able to afford their education if it wasn’t for the support of the Salesians. They are excited about participating in the digitization and publication of the journals because it not only provides them with flexible working hours, and a fair wage, but also because they see their work as a service of the Church and its mission.
Risks & Challenges
The greatest challenge in this endeavor is the amount of labor involved. The Journal has published 25 issues, totaling 89 articles and 44 book reviews. The digitization process requires scanning, running text recognition, editing metadata for the PDF containing the full issue, breaking the issue up into individual articles, indexing (titles, authors, keywords, and subjects, which requires skimming through and in some cases reading through the full article), and editing the PDF metadata for the individual articles.
Then the web element requires uploading, creating web posts for each article and full journal, copying and pasting all the indexed material, creating thumbnails, and finally publication.
The second phase requires converting the PDFs to a text format, editing each article to verify the accuracy of the text recognition and correcting errors, manually converting the footnotes to a particular online journal format, formatting section headings, and again creating new posts with all the indexed material.
Thankfully, the College students living at Don Bosco Hall are more than capable of successfully completing this challenge with your financial assistance.