[bksvol-discuss] Re: Tips For Getting Your Book Wishes Filled
- From: "Jamie Pauls" <jamiepauls@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2007 22:45:39 -0500
Thank you for the very kind and thorough explanation. I will keep that in mind
as I validate. Keep those tips coming. You have a real nack for presenting them
clearly and concisely.
----- Original Message -----
From: Monica Willyard
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2007 5:23 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Tips For Getting Your Book Wishes Filled
Hi, Jamie. Your questions are good ones. The Bookshare tools will strip out
headers if they are uniform. It preserves the page number. The system doesn't
reject books that have headers intact, so your validations are fine. The place
where the stripper gets confused is where the headers on each page are
different or don't scan clearly. For example, say that the left page has a
header with the author's name and the right page has a header with the name of
the chapter. This means that the header on the right side pages will change
every few pages. In this case, I manually remove headers, leaving the page
number intact. So at the top of the page I have a blank line, the page number,
and then another blank line. Please know that this is not required for book
acceptance. It is what many of us do to make the book as readable as possible.
It makes sure that headers are gone and that chapter headings are preserved
correctly. When our members read books in html or Braille format, they will not
see headers included in the text. Again, this is optional, and no one is going
to have a book rejected if it has headers but is a good scan.
Monica Willyard
Jamie Pauls wrote:
If there are running headers in a book with page numbers on the same line,
should the page numbers be left when the header text is removed? If I have
validated a book without removing headers, am I correct that Bookshare has a
tool that will do this thereby not causing my otherwise good validation to be
rejected? Thanks.
----- Original Message -----
From: Monica Willyard
To: Bookshare Volunteers ; Bookshare Discuss
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2007 3:30 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Tips For Getting Your Book Wishes Filled
Hi, everyone. If you've got some requests for books you'd love to read
that aren't in the Bookshare collection, I'd like to share some tips with you
that could help you get your wishes filled. Some will seem obvious to you while
others may not have even crossed your mind. I hope you'll find an idea here
that helps you get some of your book wishes filled.
1. When you post your request, make sure you give both the title and the
author. Please make sure you spell the author's name correctly since it's what
our volunteers use to search for books in library catalogs or on Amazon.
2. Get people interested in your book. Include a description of the book.
Paste it from Amazon, describe it yourself, or paste in a review of the book
from somewhere. In other words, get someone motivated to scan the book because
it sounds good. Posting a title and author is nice, and yet it doesn't give our
submitters much to go on to see if they'd like working on the book. At the end
of the day, volunteers are people, and people are more willing to take action
when they like the idea.
3. Offer to edit/validate the book when it's scanned. Doing this lets
submitters know that their work won't just sit around in validation limbo for
ages. If you say you'll edit the book, submitters will know that you'll take
care of stripping headers. I'd scan a lot more wishes if I wasn't responsible
for doing header stripping before submitting. As it is, you kind of have to
sell me on a book before I'll scan it because I know I'll have to do the
headers. It's a necessary chore with my own books. I would dread doing it on a
book I don't even want to read.
4. If you can do so, offer to buy a used or new copy of a book if someone
will scan it. While some volunteers are able to get to a library, many others
aren't. I know that a lot of submitters have bought books that have been
requested. If you can't afford to buy the books, please don't let that prevent
you from asking for books. Just be aware that offering to buy books to be
scanned is one way to help you get books into the collection.
5. Ok, I know this is really obvious, and yet I don't see it done often.
When someone scans one of your book requests, say "thank you" in in private
mail or on the list. Most of us want to know if anyone reads the books we scan.
Since we can't see how many times a book is downloaded, we have no way of
knowing if our book has been read at all. A little recognition can make the job
of scanning book requests rewarding for the person doing the scan and will make
it more likely that the submitter will work on book requests in the future.
I hope you find some of these ideas useful. I'm not the ultimate
authority on volunteering. What do you think about these tips? Do you have
other ideas to add to this list?
Monica Willyard
Other related posts:
