Hi Judy and Others,
I am always surprised when I download an excellent book and find
that
it's definitely not. Although these books are frustrating
discoveries, I think the majority of Excellent books are deserving
of
that rating.
Getting a book up to that rating is a joint effort, though. Like
you,
I appreciate the scanners' comments, explaining the validation
steps
that they followed before submitting the book. It doesn't change
my
approach to validating, but it informs me of how much time my
validation process is likely to take.
For what it's worth, I begin by searching for the number 1, in
combinations such as 1 1' 1. 1? And so forth.
I then search for random characters that typically don't belong in
the
book:
caret, accent, tilde, percent, pound, and so on. By finding these
and
eliminating them, if appropriate, I get an overall glimpse of how
much
validating needs to be done.
Spell-check or not to spell-check: I then make a determination on
whether I'll run the spellchecker. For most novels and nonfiction,
I
will; but for books such as Buddhism in Action, where I'm battling
two
spelling problems, lots of Hindi words and lots of scanographical
errors that resulted in actual words, I've determined that it isn't
worth it to run spell check.
I'll rely on my full reading of the book to catch errors.
I then scan for common scanos, such as die for the and comer for
corner. If I don't find lots of these, I figure it's a good sign.
I usually then start reading the book. Since I'm going to read
straight through, this is when I check things like whether all the
pages are there, whether lines are missing, whether certain text is
garbled, etc.
I've found that there are errors that are better caught with
speech,
and other errors better caught with Braille.
Example: One excellent book I downloaded might have read all right
with Braille, but was a nightmare when I read it with speech. This
was a book I wanted to read, and one I did read, even though there
weren't spaces after quotation marks, resulting in things like, "I
hate this,"she said. (Funny thing is, JAWS reads this just fine,
but
my Pacmate tried to run this and she together because there was no
space. It did this all through the book, because neither the
scanner
or validator went in and put spaces after the quotation marks.
This
is the kind of thing we need to find good ways to catch.
Finally, if the book has indices or other extras, I make a
determination as to whether they can be salvaged. I think I've
only
ever deleted one index, which was very nearly garbled beyond
recognition.
It was for a very short
book, and I felt it didn't add much to the book.
As I'm uploading, I review everything that will be visible when the
book goes into the collection. For instance, I check the short and
long synopses, title, author, publisher, copyright date, ISBN, and
the
selected categories and adult rating etc., to make sure it looks
good.
I'm not saying I won't miss things, but this is the rough process I
use.
One of my frustrations is when a scanner uploads a book and marks
it
as excellent, and then I open the book and it's clearly not. I
downloaded one recently where I found lots of missing words or
garbled
lines, and I knew I wouldn't be able to correct it easily. I
simply
returned the book to step one, as I figured it'd take more effort
to
fix it than I felt I could manage. I guess I could see how it
might
have gotten an excellent rating, as there were good-sized chunks of
very readable text, but when it went bad, it was really bad. I'd
appreciate an honest rating.
The book probably
deserved good, which at least would have warned potential
validators
that it would require a fair bit of work.
May I ask scanners how they determine whether to rate their
submissions as good or excellent?
And I'd love to see Bookshare scan the book on initial submission,
and
offer a potential rating. Does it do this yet? I know it's
something
we've talked about in the past.
Finally, I'd love to see a way to leave a comment as to why a
validator returned a book to step one. This could include comments
such as: Frequent Hindi words; not familiar enough to validate ...
Or
has lots of pictures that will require interpretation by a sighted
person ... Or even ... This book has too many errors for me to
validate at this time.
I hope there's value in some of this. Mostly, it's just me
thinking
publicly.
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Judy s.
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:08 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Books rated excellent recently added to
the
collection that are really only good
Let me add my 'ditto' to the complaints posted here today about
books
entering the collection recently that aren't up to snuff.
I was just crabbing off-list to Grandma Cindy about this last week.
I've downloaded several books this last month that had just entered
the collection which had many obvious errors, but were rated
excellent. I've certainly missed stuff myself when validating,
even
though I read through every single book I validate, but the errors
I
found in downloaded books were things like chapter after chapter
with
"1"
instead of "I" in the text.
As a validator, I appreciate scanners like Shelley and Mayrie (and
many
others) who put in their comments whether or not they've read the
scan
through, if they've spell-checked it, stripped headings, verified
page
numbers and the like.
I'm much more likely to download a book from the step 1 list if
that
information is available, because I know what to expect and can
judge
how much time I will have to allocate to give that book the
attention
it might need.
Judy s.
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