No, I am not saying that at all. You have a capacity of five books you can hold in your checked out pile and in order to get them there it is appropriate enough to have a hold on them long enough for you to get them. I think Evan's description of his holds is an example of using holds responsibly. He said that unless you check the list at least twice a day you will likely not even notice them there. There are a couple of others who are on this list who post so rarely that I do not remember their names who work as a team who also use the hold system as it should be used. I think I noticed one of their holds once. The problem comes in when they just sit there for weeks or even years. It has gotten to the point in the past that it really was difficult to find something to proof. As one scanned down the list there was one hold after another even to the point that the last book on the list, the one that had been on the list the longest had a hold. Aside from the fact that it was difficult to find a book to proof, these books were simply not moving. Carrie did announce that she was going to remove holds that had been there for two weeks and when she started doing that the number of holds did decrease considerably at that point, but I do still notice quite a few titles there that are dated from well over two weeks that still have holds on them. I suppose that people could have taken advantage of the exception that Carrie also mentioned that the holds would not be removed at the request of the person it was being held for, but that makes me wonder what are they waiting for anyway. And a major point I was making is that if the restriction on how many books may be checked out at once was made because people were checking them out and keeping them checked out for extremely long periods of time without either finishing them or releasing them then allowing unlimited holds kind of defeats the purpose. After all, all of us can only do so much work. If you have a book on hold for over a year then it seems to me that you may be biting off more than you can chew.
_ _ _ "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the world" Virginia Woolf The Militant: http://www.themilitant.com Pathfinder Press: http://www.pathfinderpress.com Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/index.html----- Original Message ----- From: "Valerie Maples" <vlmaples@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 1:50 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: The Hold discussion again.So, Roger, are you saying I should not be able to proof books I have bought just because I cannot do them in 2 weeks? That does not sound fair to me at all. I do not check out books to read, I only scan and proof, but far prefer proofing to see the end product and ensure it is as complete as possible, including paragraphing, something many blind people cannot do. I have bought many hard to find old series, and I think I have bought the right to proof my own books. If not, my services would be better used elsewhere...
Valerie On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Roger Loran Bailey wrote:
Actually, I am coming to doubt the necessity of the hold system at all. As I understand it, before I came to Bookshare, there was no limit on the number of books that one might have checked out. That was changed because it was being abused. That is, someone would check out books and hold them for very long periods of time running into years. Okay, a limit of five was established, but what good does that do if the same books that used to be hoarded in one's checkout pile was then hoarded in the open on the public checkout list? The only difference I see is that they were then in the way when someone was looking for something to proofread and had to skim through pages of holds to find one. On the other hand, though, I do see some reasons that it might be good to hold a book for someone. Back in August of 2008 I had almost finished proofing a certain book into which I had put quite a bit of work and I had a hard drive crash and was out of commission for a while. I contacted Cindy and asked her to grab that book when it expired and save it for me, but I think she contacted Carrie to ask that a hold be put on it for me. That was a case in which I was glad I could get one held for me. Another case of a legitimate hold is the case of Carrie having to return a book to the checkout list for some minor correction. It is only fair that the proofer who had just worked on it get a chance to correct it, but all too often those proofers never bother to pick it up again and it just sits there with a hold on it. With exceptions like I just mentioned you would only find an occasional hold on the checkout list and then only for a little while. As things stand, though, it seems to me that the abuse that the limitation on the number of books one may have checked out was not solved, but just made more public.
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