Let me reply to my own post so that I can add something. Like I said, it is rated as only good anyway and was added more than ten years ago when Bookshare standards were much lower, but also remember that back then fair quality books were also permitted. Have you ever tried reading one of those fair rated books? Fair is not the correct word as far as I am concerned. The word should be awful. Those fair quality books are virtually unreadable. They are gradually disappearing from the collection, but try this. Go to the advanced search and specify a category and specify the quality of fair. You should get at least a few results and they were all added back in the beginning days of Bookshare. Then try downloading and reading some. If you are lucky you just might be able to read enough of it to get interested and then when you reach a very important part you will encounter only garble. That is if you get lucky. The more probable outcome is that you will encounter garble from the start and find it all through. I think the quality report system was introduced to actually gradually get rid of those kind of books in the collection. It is working too, but it is, indeed, gradual. Someone has to make a quality report first. Then Bookshare has to acquire a copy of the book and scan it. Then it has to be outsourced to be proofed. Obviously the more quality reports that come in the slower the process will be. Do make those quality reports, though, and do consider submitting a BSO if you can.
On 4/20/2012 10:31 AM, 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.To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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