[bksvol-discuss] Re: The job of a proofreader is...

  • From: Ali Al-hajamy <aalhajamy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:58:08 -0400

That is certainly the case. I've only been using Bookshare since late 2009, when the quality of the scans had been getting exponentially better for a year or two, so I don't entirely know what was going on earlier, but I do know people who were around back then, and some of the stories they've told me were pretty horrific, including anecdotes of people uploading raw scans to the collection without looking at them very much, if at all, a fact that is blatantly obvious when you look at most fair, and some good, quality books on here, especially in the science fiction/fantasy genre, with science fiction fairing much worse in this regard, which is unfortunate as science fiction is a genre I rather like. Completely agree with Roger. Though sometimes it takes a while, I have had nothing but positive experiences with quality reports, at least with the three or four books I've reported. The Bookshare team takes those very seriously, which is evident when you look at the "unresolved issues" section, and see how much smaller it is than the "resolved issues", and when it is rescanned, I can guarantee it will be much better than the original book.


On 20-Apr-12 10:31, Roger Loran Bailey wrote:
I just took a look at its metadata page and I see that it is rated as only good anyway and that it was added on January 28 of 2002. Bookshare's standards were not as high then and based on what I have seen of the books that were added at that time such quality is pretty typical. There was a post here once that described what the duties of the proofreaders were back then. I don't recall exactly what it said, but I think it wasn't really much more than checking that a title page and a copyright page were present. It was not even called proofreading then. It was called validating and, indeed, I don't think that real proofreading was expected. Making the quality report is certainly the correct thing to do and based on the results that I have seen from making my own quality reports on similar older books in the collection it will probably be rescanned and sent to an outsourcer for proofing.

On 4/20/2012 8:14 AM, Ann Parsons wrote:
Hi all,

I'm writing because I just sent off a quality report about a book I'm reading. Oh, I'm going to finish the book, it's part of a series I'm reading, but I have a really hard and knotty question to ask volunteers.

Here it is, folks. Is it the job of a proofer to actually *read* a book, or can a proofer get away with checking title and so on, and then just pushing the book through?

If you answered that you thought you could get away with just checking metadata, you'd be wrong, wrong three times over. This book I'm reading, Divided Allegiance by Elizabeth Moon, has a wonderful title page and front piece. Then, I started actually *reading* the blessed thing. Well, I wasn't reading it, my DTBM was. Anyway, this book's quality was only good. There were a million scanos including the mangling of the main character's name. Do you know how aggravating it can be when your main character, mentioned about ten times per page has her name mangled five out of those ten times? Scannos like 'ff' for 'if' and garbage chars at the end of pages.

<frowning darkly> There is no excuse for this kind of sloppiness. Why do you think it takes me weeks to proof a book? It's because I actually read every, single, word in the whole blessed book! I have allowed a book to be sent up after reading half or so of it, but only once. That was because the scanner was known to me, the book I had read so far had been aeror free, and I knew that the quality would be the same throughout! If I proof, I read. All this stuff could have been easily fixed! <grrrrr> Sorry for ranting guys, but I devoutly hope that my rant has stopped any lazy proofers in their tracks and caused them to reexamine their work.

Ann P.

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