[bksvol-discuss] Re: Tips For Getting Your Book Wishes Filled
- From: Anastasia Saridakis <anamatia81@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2007 14:16:37 -0700 (PDT)
very well put Monica.
Take care
Anastasia
Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 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
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