Hi, everyone. If you've got some requests for books you'd love to read that aren't in the Bookshare collection, I'd like to share some tips with you that could help you get your wishes filled. Some will seem obvious to you while others may not have even crossed your mind. I hope you'll find an idea here that helps you get some of your book wishes filled.
1. When you post your request, make sure you give both the title and the author. Please make sure you spell the author's name correctly since it's what our volunteers use to search for books in library catalogs or on Amazon.
2. Get people interested in your book. Include a description of the book. Paste it from Amazon, describe it yourself, or paste in a review of the book from somewhere. In other words, get someone motivated to scan the book because it sounds good. Posting a title and author is nice, and yet it doesn't give our submitters much to go on to see if they'd like working on the book. At the end of the day, volunteers are people, and people are more willing to take action when they like the idea.
3. Offer to edit/validate the book when it's scanned. Doing this lets submitters know that their work won't just sit around in validation limbo for ages. If you say you'll edit the book, submitters will know that you'll take care of stripping headers. I'd scan a lot more wishes if I wasn't responsible for doing header stripping before submitting. As it is, you kind of have to sell me on a book before I'll scan it because I know I'll have to do the headers. It's a necessary chore with my own books. I would dread doing it on a book I don't even want to read.
4. If you can do so, offer to buy a used or new copy of a book if someone will scan it. While some volunteers are able to get to a library, many others aren't. I know that a lot of submitters have bought books that have been requested. If you can't afford to buy the books, please don't let that prevent you from asking for books. Just be aware that offering to buy books to be scanned is one way to help you get books into the collection.
5. Ok, I know this is really obvious, and yet I don't see it done often. When someone scans one of your book requests, say "thank you" in in private mail or on the list. Most of us want to know if anyone reads the books we scan. Since we can't see how many times a book is downloaded, we have no way of knowing if our book has been read at all. A little recognition can make the job of scanning book requests rewarding for the person doing the scan and will make it more likely that the submitter will work on book requests in the future.
I hope you find some of these ideas useful. I'm not the ultimate authority on volunteering. What do you think about these tips? Do you have other ideas to add to this list?
Monica Willyard
