[bksvol-discuss] Re: My nickel's worth--quality control
- From: "Gary Petraccaro" <garyp130@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 22:57:08 -0400
Thank you. I was beginning to feel as if I were in a minority of 1 or 2.
Having scanned for Years, I can say that for every extra minute spent on
making sure a scanned book was as good as possible, probably 5 to 10 times
more is saved going down the validation trail.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Liz Halperin" <lizzers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2004 5:04 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] My nickel's worth--quality control
> 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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