[bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
- From: "Shelley L. Rhodes" <juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 23:50:23 -0500
it should maintain page breaks.
So please submit as .rtf so more of us can get our mitts at them.
Shelley L. Rhodes and Judson, guiding golden
juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Guide Dogs For the Blind Inc.
Graduate Advisory Council
www.guidedogs.com
The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to
stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.
-- Vance Havner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Miller" <brian-r-miller@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:31 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
Word on Page Breaks from Jim FruchtermanDoes anyone know if converting an
arkenstone file to RTF loses the page breaks?
Should I upload as an ark file, or convert them to RTF?
Brian Miller
----- Original Message -----
From: Marissa Mika
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:10 AM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
Happy New Year, everybody! Jim Fruchterman writing here.
I wanted to weigh in on the page break issue, since I've read some of the
messages flying around and want to make sure folks know how seriously we
take the input.
First of all, many of you know that we did a big survey of our users. One
of the major points we heard was to make a priority of improving the quality
of our books. The two key aspects of quality are text accuracy and
navigation. A great thing about our volunteer team has been the dedication
to quality, and this has been important to customer satisfaction. For
example, you probably are aware that there is an effort to upgrade the
quality of all the "Fair" quality books in our collection to Good or
Excellent. Thanks to you, we just surpassed 20,000 books live on Bookshare!
Right now, the main navigation element in our books are pages, beyond
words and paragraphs. Pages that have no page breaks are a problem,
especially for the novice users we are increasingly trying to serve. I have
seen the confusion on the faces on students and teachers when we open a book
with no pages. So, we want to make sure that page breaks are part of the
books we add to Bookshare.org. This is a priority for our broad base of
users, and is important for responding to their quality needs. It's also
critical in our support of the DAISY standard, since navigation capabilities
are one of the main benefits of DAISY.
When I agreed to the policy change to reject "one page books," it was
because I understood that we were getting very few of them submitted.
Almost all of our volunteers are submitting books that are fine. I also
understood we were working with volunteers who were submitting books without
page breaks to make sure they weren't lost in the post-OCR process. So, we
didn't think this would be a big deal. I'm sorry if it seems like we
weren't approaching this in a caring, Benetech-style way. It certainly is
our intent to do this nicely (although the automated email process could use
some tweaking, I'm sure!).
To ensure that this policy decision works for you and to enhance the
navigability of our books and to improve our standards, Bookshare will no
longer accept "one page books" after the end of March 2005. We're hoping
that this will give our volunteers enough time to adjust to this new
standard and publish the hard work of our submitters and validators who have
submitted books recently that lack page breaks.
Scanned books come in without page breaks for two reasons:
1. They get dropped by accident during the post-OCR processing. The OCR
packages put the page breaks into scanned books by default. Some editors
will drop these page breaks.
2. They were done long ago and have no page breaks because they were
edited out at the time.
The first one is the important one. Our engineering team is working with
the Bookshare.org ops team to figure out how page breaks get lost and how to
avoid that. We'll draft some FAQs on page breaks to explain how to keep
them in different editor scenarios. We think that this should be pretty
easy to figure out and avoid losing the page breaks.
The old books that don't have them are too much work to re-enter them by
hand. We have a process for adding page breaks back in after a fixed number
of lines, but it is not the ideal process. We would rather have these books
in the collection than not have them, but we'd like to minimize this as much
as possible.
Thanks for working with us to make Bookshare.org as good as it can be.
Jim Fruchterman
President & CEO
Benetech
480 California Ave, Suite 201
Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA
(650) 475-5440 x-106
Fax: (650) 475-1066
jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.benetech.org
The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
A nonprofit organization
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