[bksvol-discuss] Re: Using Our Validation Resources Wisely
- From: "Julia Kulak" <julia.kulak@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:48:24 -0800
Wow. And I thought all of the booksharians were enlightened thoughtful
creatures! I guess there are silly people everywhere, its just too bad that
they're too stubborn to benefit from learning and the rest of us get stuck with
their screw ups.
Julia
----- Original Message -----
From: Monica Willyard
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 4:09 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Using Our Validation Resources Wisely
You've got a good point, Elizabeth. I could go for that plan. Sorting is
different from a save every book campaign. I was picturing spending countless
hours on cleaning marginal books and should have checked with you to see if
that's what you had in mind. Since some of us are experienced validaters, it
does make sense that we take a look and see what can actually be salvaged and
what should be rejected. It isn't fair to ask a new volunteer to do that. I
just don't want to do anything that would encourage further submissions of more
completely illegible books.
For those of you who are new here, it may sound harsh or snobbish when
Elizabeth and I talk about rejecting certain scans. There is a history here
that may not seem obvious to you. Knowing about it may change how you see this
discussion. We have a couple of submitters who regularly scan and submit books
without reading a single word to see how their scan came out. They submit books
with literally page after page of jibberish, books with whole chapters missing,
and sometimes even submit a book of one title that ends up being a completely
different book. These books are done by the same couple people over and over
again. They set the rating on their scan as fair and usually don't provide a
synopsis or even specify which category a book goes in. Just to keep us on our
toes, one of these people submits a readable scan every once in awhile. Several
of us have offered them help in private email, on the list, and even by phone.
Their response to us has been that as long as Bookshare will accept their
books, they'll keep submitting them. Some of us have spent a great deal of time
trying to fix these books, believing that these people would submit better
scans as they learned to use their software. When these people told us that
they have no intention of changing the quality of what they submit, we began to
feel discouraged and then very frustrated because there are so many of these
books. Now most of us won't even try taking one of these scans because we dread
what we'll get stuck with.
I'm still sort of recovering after my last really messy validation. It was
right on the border of being rejected, and it only ended up going through
because I found a print copy and rescanned at least a third of the pages. No
amount of credit would induce me to spend that much time and effort on a book
with so many errors again. It's faster to rescan the book completely. As Mickey
has pointed out in the past, there are some books in very good condition in
that pile on step 1, so some sorting does need to take place. Getting rid of
the ones that are unreadable will let us focus on the ones that are.
Monica Willyard
E. wrote:
I am suggesting that we validators go through the books by submitters with
poor records as quickly as possible. Reject those which need rejecting as
quickly as possible so new validators do not get stuck with them. Get staff
clear that we validators are only willing to put in so much time on one book
when the submitter could have given a clean scan with a little up front care.
Remember about a tenth of the books on step one were from such poor submitters
in the recent past. I have not checked lately. Cleaning up step 1 rapidly
means less of such books for new validators to stumble upon and find
frustrating.
E.
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