[bksvol-discuss] Re: our commitment to you: from Jim Fruchterman and Betsy Beaumon
- From: Scott Rains <scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Scott Rains <scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 12:44:03 -0700
Dan,
I overlooked that you were responding specifically to the bullet point below on
PDFs:
"Proofing PDF files. The bulk of publishers in the U.S., and almost all
publishers in the developing world, do not have the modern XML capabilities of
the major trade publishers. We are getting tons of PDF books from these
publishers, which need volunteer effort to convert into accessible form."
Yes, we do need volunteers' assistance in this area. I will follow up with
specifics after checking on that for you.
Scott Rains
Benetech Fellow, Bookshare Volunteer Department
________________________________________
From: Scott Rains
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 12:24 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [bksvol-discuss] Re: our commitment to you: from Jim Fruchterman
and Betsy Beaumon
Dan,
You win today's prize for asking the sort of question I hoped would be asked.
Yes, your check is in the mail. grin
Anticipating that all Bookshare volunteers would like to know more on PQ from
the engineering perspective I asked the engineer who reported on the PQ project
at last month's all-company meeting to write you a summary. I kept held it back
until after Jim and Betsy's note was published so you would have context.
Here is Paul's report to you:
Hi Scott,
Please do share our work with the volunteers! It has definitely been a major
effort to get these publisher books flowing while also ensuring that "publisher
quality" really means something. I think if volunteers understand that the
purpose is not to displace their hard work but instead to bring huge numbers of
new books to our users just as quickly as they hit the shelves in bookstores,
then perhaps they'll tolerate the replacements better.
The presentation I gave was purely verbal, but here are the points:
Testing was performed separately for each publisher. The general strategy for
vetting ePub conversions included the following:
Processing a large volume of ePubs through through our ePub-to-DAISY converter
to uncover any bugs in the conversion itself. That is, we made sure that each
ePub could become a DAISY at all. Sometimes failures resulted from bugs, but
more often they resulted from bad publisher files (i.e., we couldn't unzip the
file). Bad files are now being sent back to the publishers automatically.
Verifying that only converted books with a high standard of quality were
automatically published to the collection. This involves the complex quality
"score" that checks things like page counts, DAISY file structure, metadata
accuracy, etc. Also, verifying that missing metadata would prevent books
automatically publishing to the collection (e.g., missing synopsis, ISBN,
copyright info, etc.).
Performing a detailed inspection of up to 100 individual books per publisher.
This involved opening each book in AnyDaisy, VRSoft, and ROL to check the
following:
Heading structure and book navigability - make sure that each heading in the
DAISY actually should be a heading and that no headings are missing.
Pagination - make sure that if the publisher gave us a book with pages, then
all the pages are present and navigable.
Image quality and descriptions (where applicable) - make sure that images
render well and that captions and alt text are voiced correctly in readers that
support them (O'Reilly books in particular have great image-related text).
Internal and external book links - make sure that links within books (e.g.,
click "Chapter 6" in the table of contents, and jump to chapter 6) are
supported in the DAISY. These links aren't supported in all players, but they
are in some.
Verifying that the BRF version was produced successfully.
Logging every bug or issue that emerged from testing (and there were probably
hundreds over the course of all the 5 months of testing), fixing the vast
majority of them, and then repeating all this testing for each publisher to
make sure our fixes didn't create new problems.
I hope this helps!
Paul
Scott Rains
Benetech Fellow, Bookshare Volunteer Department
________________________________________
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Dan Beaver [dbeaver888@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 11:52 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: our commitment to you: from Jim Fruchterman and
Betsy Beaumon
Hi,
How can we find out more about the pdf conversions? I would very much like to
participate in this effort if we volunteers out here are allowed to do so.
I already have some software that converts pdfs to Word and RTF files. I
suspect it probably isn't as robust as what Bookshare uses in house though.
thanks.
From: Nicole Gnutzman<mailto:nicoleg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 1:46 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] our commitment to you: from Jim Fruchterman and Betsy
Beaumon
Jim and Betsy asked me to share their thoughts on Benetech's commitment to its
volunteer program.
Dear Bookshare Volunteers,
We wanted to give you some thoughts on the critical importance of volunteers to
Bookshare and its mission of getting everybody in the world with a print
disability access to the books they need for education, employment and full
inclusion in society. Although there’s been a lot of change in Bookshare, one
thing that won’t change is our need for volunteers that share our dedication to
that mission.
Bookshare is the first library for people with print disabilities built
primarily by people with print disabilities (as well as book-lovers of all
types!). Our credo has been that if someone thought a book was worth scanning,
we thought it was worth sharing. We knew that people with disabilities had few
choices for accessible materials, and that scanning was a frustrating and slow
process.
The volunteers built Bookshare into a potent force for equality: we’ve
revolutionized a field that was falling far short of meeting the goal of
equality when it comes to access to the printed word. And you’ve worked with
us to revolutionize the quality of our scanned books through meticulous
proofreading. Thanks to partnerships with over 60 publishers (especially a
handful of huge trade publishers), we have now been able to add thousands of
new titles to Bookshare electronically, delighting our users. Scott and Pavi
have shared with us, and our management team, some of the negative impacts this
has had on the morale of some of our volunteers. This is especially true when
a publisher-supplied version of a title displaces a volunteer-supplied version
of that same title.
We know some people feel like that’s not respectful of their volunteer time, or
that somehow their volunteer time was wasted. I hope you realize that it has
been the potent force of our volunteers creating Bookshare that has brought so
many modern publishers to the table, since we can tell them that we already can
scan all of their books, but providing it electronically will save us time and
the cost of buying a book, chopping it, scanning it and proofreading it. The
two things they want in return from us is to publicize their social
responsibility and replace our scanned versions with the version they supply.
The replacement issue is pretty much a standard requirement: publishers want to
be assured of the quality of their books we’re distributing. For the publishers
it’s built into the publishing culture, they do believe their original product
is superior and that this requirement implements their contractual
responsibilities to the authors, even though most readers will concur that
these are also not perfect. While there are exceptions, the value of having
15-20,000 publisher supplied books over a year to our users is incredibly high.
These publisher partnerships are a terrific way to help advance our mission, in
terms of quality, quantity and uniquely, reach outside the United States. But,
they are not going to replace our need for volunteers. We have a long way to
go to deliver equal access to our users, and the market is going to fail to
fill these needs for the foreseeable future (even as we applaud the recent
accessibility work of Amazon, Apple and Google).
Let me give you some ideas of the gaps that still exist:
� Older books, specialty books, or simply books that aren’t in the top 5%
of sales during the years since 2000. While it makes sense for us to invest
the effort of the amazing Robin Seaman, our Publisher Liaison, and our
engineering team to support a publisher who can give us 4,000 titles at once,
there aren’t very many more of those big name publishers, but there are over
25,000 publishers.
� Proofing PDF files. The bulk of publishers in the U.S., and almost all
publishers in the developing world, don’t have the modern XML capabilities of
the major trade publishers. We are getting tons of PDF books from these
publishers, which need volunteer effort to convert into accessible form.
� The international challenge: new titles, new publishers, new languages
and new communities of Bookshare volunteers in other countries who would
benefit from mentoring. Americans have Bookshare, but the average person with
a print disability has nothing. We have so much more to do globally!
� Proofing textbooks. The textbook industry is way behind the technology
curve and Carrie is sitting on stacks of hardcopy textbooks sent in by teachers
from around the country.
� Metadata. Even if we have something, it only helps if the person
looking for it finds it. We can use significant volunteer help cleaning up the
information about our information.
� Quality improvements. Improving quality on older, lower quality books.
� Image description. A huge challenge that our field has barely begun to
scratch the surface of. Our publisher contracts do allow us to add them to the
publisher-supplied books and we recently received a major award over five
years from the Department of Ed for the DIAGRAM Center, to research and then
develop technology to reduce the cost of doing image descriptions. The
centerpiece is developing tools for better and faster volunteer image
description. Stay tuned!
The list goes on. While the need for volunteer work on major trade books of
the last five years is going down as these come in directly from publishers,
these other needs are acute.
Our responsibility is to get better at communicating with volunteers about our
needs, and about what’s going to be happening. Our technology roadmap has
numerous improvements planned around improving visibility on these issues so
that you can avoid doing those books that are likely to come in directly in
from the publisher. But, there are and will be thousands of opportunities for
volunteer tasks that are unlikely to ever be done any other way than through
volunteer efforts. We really want to create systems where having volunteer
work displaced quickly by publisher supplied content is a rarity.
We hope you’ll find personally rewarding volunteer opportunities now, and in
the future, with Benetech. For those of you who aren’t excited about the
changes, we understand. But, please be 100% clear: Bookshare volunteers have
been the primary force for revolutionary change in accessibility of books.
There are many thousands of students and adults with disabilities that have far
greater access to the printed word thanks to your past efforts. But, the
revolution is far from finished: we’re serving 100,000 people today and there
are over 100,000,000 who need Bookshare on the planet. We hope you’ll continue
to volunteer your time in helping realize the vision we all share of equal
access for everyone who needs it!
Jim Fruchterman & Betsy Beaumon
Nicole Gnutzman
Director, Literacy Operations
nicoleg@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:nicoleg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
www.bookshare.org<http://www.bookshare.org>
www.benetech.org<http://www.benetech.org>
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