[bksvol-discuss] Re: Requirements for acceptance -- the bottom line
- From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 19:03:07 -0500
Ah yes. the notion of what is readable is the rub in all of this. Richard, I
love your idea about the volunteers and validating.
But getting back to the idea of readable, consider, if you will, what would
happen to you if you turned in a term paper, let's not even discuss a thesis
or disertation, just a garden variety term paper, and that paper had
a bunch of cross-outs, scribblings, maybe a few coffee stains obscuring some of
the text. What are the chances, do you suppose, that you would get anything but
an F on that messy paper, 95 or even 98 percent of
which might be perfectly readable? Why the heck should people pay for anything
less than the high end of "good" quality? Why shouldn't we as submitters of
materials take enough pride in what we submit to want to
make it truly readable, i.e. containing some errors, but not so many that the
meaning of entire passages is garbled? Obviously, if you have an old book with
a bad font that just won't ocr well, there's not a lot you can
do. I've got such a book that I keep trying, hoping that the next iteration of
K1k will unlock the key to the crummy Soviet-era font and paper on which the
book was printed, so that I can actually enjoy reading the
book myself and have a decent enough scan to post for anybody else crazy enough
to want to read this particular volume. <smile>
Somebody posted a question asking about how the standards were decided upon, or
words to that effect. I too would be interested in that, and would like to know
if there is anything that we can do to revisit the issue
and get them raised. The word "readable" means very different things to
different people, it would seem. Otherwise, we wouldn't have titles on the
system with portions that are totally garbled and not at all readable.
Mary
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