Donna, I'm sure you have gotten a lot of replies to your note here. I have to speak up and agree with you wholeheartedly. Especially in the area of fiction paperbacks, there is no good reason that a validater should have to spend hours retyping or even rescanning pages to make a fair scan legible. I don't do it anymore, and I reject books where that kind of work is necessary. Submitters and validaters are supposed to work as a team. If either person does sloppy work, the burden falls on the other person to pick up the slack unless both are willing to put a sloppy scan up on Bookshare. If I'm going to spend hours working on a book and have to buy the book just to figure out what the scannos are, I'd rather reject the fair copy and spend the time doing a fresh, and excellent, scan. It takes less time to rescan a book than it does to type in long passages and fix thousands of errors. I can scan an average paperback in 45 minutes and usually spend an hour or two on clean up. So, if a fiction paperback book rated fair is going to take more than 3 hours for me to fix, it gets rejected. I buy or borrow a copy and scan it cleanly, and I think my time is best used this way.
Monica Willyard Donna Smith wrote:
Hi all.I apologize in advance if this suggestion ruffles feathers, but it is made in the spirit of getting excellent quality books into the collection.I am one of the volunteers who believes that "validating" a book shouldn't involve rewriting it because the scan is poor.
