Certification of Volunteer Work
If you need certification of volunteer participation
Disclaimer: We are unable to provide certification for any purpose that would require Distributed Proofreaders to track the number of hours spent volunteering, or to provide verification of a user's identity beyond that provided by their email address, or to certify that the volunteer personally performed the work. For these reasons, we cannot provide certification for court-ordered community service, programs operated by federal, state, or municipal governments, etc.
For other types of community service, the following requirements will help ensure that you're providing a service for your community service credit that benefits the Distributed Proofreaders community.
Our certification will take the form of an email to the organization and organization contact identified by the volunteer (see below for details), with a copy to the volunteer. This certification will identify the volunteer by their DP username, the real name they have provided, and their registered email address. It will describe the time period the volunteer has worked with Distributed Proofreaders and the number of pages they completed during that time. No other information can be provided, and no indication of the amount of time (hours) spent by the volunteer or the quality of the work completed will be provided or confirmed.
For school purposes we can provide a form of certification, however, we cannot directly certify time spent so if your school needs to know how many hours you worked, you will need to track and log your hours yourself and the school will need to accept your records. Please discuss this with your school supervisor and make sure this is acceptable.
The certificate we provide will provide the number of pages proofread/formatted up to that time. If volunteers need further proof of volunteer participation for that same organization, we recommend that they use the Pages Proofread Per Day script and submit that along with the certificate already issued.
If you're new to Distributed Proofreaders
To obtain formal confirmation of volunteer work performed at Distributed Proofreaders, volunteers must:
- Contact dphelp as soon as they know they will need confirmation of volunteer participation, and provide official contact information for the organization to which the confirmation is to be sent. It is essential that both the volunteer and the organization understand at the start that Distributed Proofreaders does not provide information or estimates regarding time spent volunteering, and that both parties confirm acceptance of these limitations.
- Be a registered volunteer with Distributed Proofreaders for a minimum of 21 days before any confirmation will be sent.
- Understand that no more than 50 pages per day may be counted.
If you do not need "formal" confirmation, please follow the instructions below under Informal Documentation.
Long-term Volunteers
If you are a longer-term Distributed Proofreaders volunteer and require confirmation of volunteer work, please contact dphelp and describe the situation and the information you need.
Limitations of the Confirmation of Volunteer Participation Document
Distributed Proofreaders was founded in 2000 and consists entirely of volunteers. The website provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of public domain books into e-books. During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. This allows the text to be compared to the image, proofread, and sent back to the site. Once the pages are proofread, formatted, joined together, and checked, the completed e-books are uploaded to Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) to be distributed freely.
- Because we have no way of telling how long someone actually spends proofreading pages, we do not verify or estimate time spent doing work at Distributed Proofreaders. Some pages are very simple (for example, blank pages: pages with no text or illustrations on them); some are very difficult (for example, a full-page multi-column table with a lot of numbers). One type of page might take 2 seconds, and the other 2 hours. This prevents us from doing any kind of estimation or verification of the time you spend. You must track it yourself, and if the organization that requires the certification needs to know the number of hours, you will need to provide the information to them and provide a verification method that is satisfactory to them.
- Distributed Proofreaders cannot confirm who did the pages, only that they were done by someone logged into the account for which you have requested confirmation.
- Please allow at least 5 days for information to be gathered and the report to be prepared.
- The report will be emailed to both the DP user and the official contact for the organization for which the confirmation is required.
Note: Some organizations, especially schools, request certification via an online form. We will not participate in that kind of certification. Our only certification is via an email to the organization and to the volunteer.
Informal Documentation
If you simply wish to generate a report of the pages you have proofread or formatted over a specific period, you can use the Pages Proofread/Formatted Per Day script.