Ask HN: Take over abandoned GitHub repo

I'm interested in participating more in the open source community, and have found a project that I can work on during business hours with the blessing of my employer. The maintainer hasn't pushed code or responded to any posted issues or pull requests in more than a year. I've tried emailing the current owner, but no response.

The project in question is a pure-Python PDF parsing libarary, pdfminer. https://github.com/euske/pdfminer

What's the best course of action? Rename (e.g. pdfminer2) and try to communicate that to the existing user base? Quietly work on my own branch? Contact GitHub support to try to transfer it?