![the Open Siddur Project [logo]](https://opensiddur.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Open-Siddur-Project-Logo-2016.svg){kind=logo}
Open Siddur Project Development Status as of 9/22/2009
Our second development status covers progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 8/23/09. Email aharon@opensiddur.org if you want to include something we haven’t covered. For now we’ll be sending these out once a month but if you’d like to get news of Open Siddur as it happens, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter.
Contributions
A beautiful scan of the Routledge Mahzor was contributed to the Internet Archive by the Princeton Theological Seminary Library (see http://groups.google.com/group/jewishliturgy-discuss/t/433a218e6f5a130b). Other important scans of siddurim in the public domain have been uploaded by the University of Toronto and the YIVO Institute. Scans contributed through the Internet Archive provide the Open Siddur project with a well of texts for digital transcription.
We are looking for a copy of Siddur Torah Ohr to correct and proof a digital transcription of the siddur already available CC-BY-SA at wikisource. Do you have one we could use? Please let us know.
The Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Culture is consulting with Open Siddur on the copyright status of extant works that may be in the public domain. Thanks Ben and Justin!
Documentation
How can folk contribute material to the Open Siddur Project right now? See our new https://opensiddur.org/contribute/upload/ for more information.
We are looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our conditional inclusion feature.
Volunteer Management
Open Siddur is looking for someone to gradually step into the role of volunteer manager. If folks want to step up, then Efraim and Aharon are ready to apprentice them :)
Organization/Structure
How can we best describe the principles which inspire a project that seeks to be both a repository of traditional historical texts and a resource for folks sharing new translations, t’fillot, commentary, and other content? We now have a draft Mission Statement. We’ve had some feedback on the discussion list and would like some more.
We also have a list of milestones to help track our progress and note where we are falling behind.
Communication and Promotion
JT Waldman at the Jewish Publication Society posted a lovely article with some choice quotes from Aharon Varady on “Judaism, Free Culture, and the Open Siddur Project.” (Thanks to JT and JPS! Check out http://jpsinteractive.org/blog/jt/sneak-peek-tagged-tanakh for a sneak peek at JPS’ innovative interactive TaNaKh project.)
Rabbi Saul Berman had some thoughts on why new siddurim cannot mitigate against the influence of modernity. Aharon responds here, and also on our discussion list here.
The Lookstein Institute has been helping to inform educators about the work of the Open Siddur in their newsletter. (Thank you!)
The Lookstein Institute and JESNA also helped us disseminate our invitation to educators who might know of students that might be interested in developing theirs skills with a compelling software project such as ours: https://opensiddur.org/2009/08/invitation-to-young-technologists/ (Thank you!)
We had our second ever Open Siddur Open Chat at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy on September 13th. The summary and logs of the chat are available on our wiki.
Software Development
Efraim is working on a partial implementation of XPointer to be used in our XSLT transforms and XQuery. In the process, he developed a generic parser generator for XSLT (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/XSLT_Grammar_Parser). This is a prerequisite to the continued development of (1) toolkit APIs that grab ordered text segments from JLPTEI documents and (2) transforms to convert JLPTEI to other forms. The code is currently under testing.
Azriel has been developing OSNAT, the Open Siddur Network Application for Transcription. It’s still in rough alpha, but includes a fly in-browser Hebrew Unicode 5.0 standard keyboard.
We are always looking for more software developers! Interested? Please contact us with your skills.
System Administration
Azriel writes, “We have begun nightly backups of the MySQL database.” If anyone would like to give us a hand with administration of the wiki or the *nix system it lives on, please email him, azriel@opensiddur.org
Efraim writes, “I’ve upgraded the eXist installation to a version closer to the 1.4 release candidate (eXist subversion revision 10000), and set up the versioning filter in the /db/base collection. This should give us revision tracking for newly stored XML data. Revision tracking on the code and schemas will still be done using Google Code subversion.”
Team Member Updates
Dan Sieradski’s Jew It Yourself and Eileen Levinson’s Haggadot.com recently got seed funding from Lynn Schusterman’s ROI. Congrats!
Aharon Varady began a fellowship for Judaic Studies at North America’s first egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar. Huzzah!
On behalf of the entire Open Siddur Project team, Happy New Year 5770! Here’s wishing you all a productive year of inspired learning, compassionate living, and loving-kindness nourished by creativity and wonder.
“Development Status (2009-09-22)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
(This image is set to automatically show as the "featured image" in category pages and in shared links on social media.)
- Properly attribute the work to the Hierophant.
- Clearly indicate the date you accessed the work and in what ways, if any, you modified it. (If you have adapted the work, let us know so that the contributor might consider endorsing your revision.)
- Provide the stable link to this resource: <https://opensiddur.org/?p=196>.
- Indicate that the original work was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license. (To redistribute or remix this work in any format, modified or unmodified, you must refer to the terms of the license under which the work is shared.)
- The views expressed in this work represent the views of their creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers, its diverse community of volunteer contributors, or its institutional partners.
- We strongly advise against printing sacred texts and art containing divine names as these copies must be regarded with reverence, complicating their casual treatment and disposal.
- If you must dispose of a printed sacred text (one containing Divine Names), please locate the closest genizah (often established by a synagogue) and contact its custodians for further instructions. We also recommend using Morah Yehudis Fishman's Prayer for Adding a Work to the Genizah.
Comments, Corrections, and Queries