[bksvol-discuss] Thoughts About Quality Ratings


I have seen several comments from Jill and others about submitters not caring about the quality of books they submit. There are two issues that aren't being accounted for when these comments are made. Because of them, I feel both hurt and offended by the comments.

First, those of us who are not fortunate enough to have K1000 have no way to rank spelling. We who use Openbook cannot easily see what our accuracy rate is. We also do not have the same ability to control brightness or rescan pages with a different OCR engine like K1000 users do.

Second, Bookshare's instructions for both submissions and validations are vague about which quality rating to apply to a scan. When I started out here in January, my scans looked pretty good to me, and I rated a few as excellent. Then I got to see some of Katie's scans and realized that mine aren't so excellent after all. No one told me how to rate my scans during my first several submissions. It was a subjective call for me, and I had little to compare my work to since books in the collection have been cleaned up and validated. I think it is unfair to say that the submitter doesn't care about producing good scans when not all tools are created equal and the criteria for ratings isn't definite or clearly explained.

I think that if Bookshare wants better quality control, it will need to be very clear on what is acceptable. I think Bookshare will also need to provide their tool during the submission process to rate the quality for the submitter and possibly make arrangements for submitters to purchase proper tools at a group discount rate so that everyone can submit perfect scans. Until then, you will continue to see scans with the wrong rating and lots of poorly scanned books entering the collection, especially from people who aren't on the volunteers list.


Monica
Visit my blog at: http://plumlipstick.livejournal.com 

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