[bksvol-discuss] My nickel's worth--quality control
- From: "Liz Halperin" <lizzers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 14:04:12 -0700
Ok, I suspect I may get bashed, but here goes anyway:
I wish everyone would just SLOW DOWN. There seems to be this frenzy to
get books into the collection, and less care on their quality. As a
braille reader, I know I am in the minority, but my patience for sloppy
books is low.
When I scan a book I am very careful to send a clean copy up. I don't
expect the validator to have to do much of anything except make sure no
corruption of the file has occurred. I am proud of quality over
quantity.
I have been doing some validating and there have been a few books
equally clean as those I submit. They are a joy to validate. Most have
problems. I fix what I can. Books are submitted without the ISBN listed
(even though it's right there), sections missing, whole messed up pages.
When I am faced with many blank pages and then text pages run together
and too many spelling errors and character errors, I feel no guilt to
reject the book. It's not worth spending so many hours on. Better to get
it rescanned in a better version. When I finally validate something,
it's clean and ready to go. Any problems after that are from the
Bookshare conversion processes.
With over 500 books waiting for validation, I wish there would be a
moratorium on scanning submissions. When there was too much backlog at
the Bookshare end, they made a concerted effort to get caught up. It's
now OUR end that needs the effort, the volunteers.
The two lists, books-volunteer-discuss and books-discuss, are very very
busy. What if all the time spent reading and writing on the lists was
spent on validating, for awhile, at least?
What if scanners made an effort to send up better quality? What if
validators had better quality to start with and so could approve faster
and cleaner? What if we humans went beyond spellcheck and made sure that
other errors were caught? Errors such as "form" for "from" and "end" for
"and" and stuff like that? What if we went for quality over quantity
for awhile?
Liz in Seattle
Liz Halperin
Seattle, WA
lizzers@xxxxxxxxxxx
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