Once again, the Open Siddur Project has been mentioned in the press, this time by Steve Lipman in the Jewish Week.
The Open Siddur is a volunteer driven project to create a free resource for folks crafting their own siddur (Jewish prayer book). We intend to collaboratively build an archive of material that makes up the siddur — texts, translations, instructional material, commentaries, essays, and other associated media. Along with the archive, we are building the software that can be used to put together the building blocks to customize and personalize the siddur. Ultimately, siddurim prepared from this content may be printed on your home printer, by on-demand print shop, or in cooperation with a book artist.
For more about our mission, click here. To see some early technology demos, click here. To learn move about how you can get involved in helping to build the Open Siddur, read on.
By “open,” we mean that our code and our texts are free to take under permissive copyright licenses. We are creating a community of folks passionate about the siddur and who express their passion by contributing material that can be used by others in the preparation of their own siddurim. This material could be historic or new, familiar or obscure. We seek to design a tool that will provide a resource to help those who take Jewish spirituality seriously engage in their own spiritual practice.
If you’d like to help us, take a look at the following opportunities to contribute (below), fill out our survey, or just contact us. (Donations, if you like, can be made to this project via our fiscal sponsor the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity. )
| If you … | then … |
|---|---|
| can type in Hebrew with vowels… | try transcribing a line or a page from a historic siddur. |
| can proofread English text… | try proofreading a page from an automatically transcribed English translation of the Tanach. |
| have already written liturgy-related material… | share it with a free culture license. |
| have access to public domain books and a high speed book scanner… | try finding copies of or scanning from our list of wanted books. |
| code or document XML… | proofread, debug, and/or provide examples for the JLPTEI XML specification, improve validators using TEI ODD or Schematron. |
| code in any language… | help us write one-time transformations to convert contributed material into JLPTEI. |
| code in CSS … | help us write rendering instructions for web browsers. |
| code in Javascript… | help us build our web application. |
| code in Java… | help us build the compiler application and/or choose and improve existing rendering engines. |
| code in XSLT 2.0… | help us write transforms. |
| code in XQuery… | help us write the toolkit API. |
For more details on our development and to get status updates, please fill out our survey. If you’d like to follow our developments closely and participate, then please join our discussion list, friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and check out our development wiki (our current storehouse for documentation and texts).
