The same people have been doing this for years. Staff either cannot or will not pre-screen submits by folks with poor track records. This leads to literally dozens of poor submits which are now on the step 1 list.
Fortunately many of these books are in a particular category making them a bit easier to spot.
I do think that some kind of tool to evaluate a book and give it a automated rating might help. Staff and validators need to work with submitters to slow down such list clutter. We have had years of it and validators are losing our sense of humor (grin).
E. So would more action on the p At 07:09 PM 11/22/2007, you wrote:
You've got a good point, Elizabeth. I could go for that plan. Sorting is different from a save every book campaign. I was picturing spending countless hours on cleaning marginal books and should have checked with you to see if that's what you had in mind. Since some of us are experienced validaters, it does make sense that we take a look and see what can actually be salvaged and what should be rejected. It isn't fair to ask a new volunteer to do that. I just don't want to do anything that would encourage further submissions of more completely illegible books.For those of you who are new here, it may sound harsh or snobbish when Elizabeth and I talk about rejecting certain scans. There is a history here that may not seem obvious to you. Knowing about it may change how you see this discussion. We have a couple of submitters who regularly scan and submit books without reading a single word to see how their scan came out. They submit books with literally page after page of jibberish, books with whole chapters missing, and sometimes even submit a book of one title that ends up being a completely different book. These books are done by the same couple people over and over again. They set the rating on their scan as fair and usually don't provide a synopsis or even specify which category a book goes in. Just to keep us on our toes, one of these people submits a readable scan every once in awhile. Several of us have offered them help in private email, on the list, and even by phone. Their response to us has been that as long as Bookshare will accept their books, they'll keep submitting them. Some of us have spent a great deal of time trying to fix these books, believing that these people would submit better scans as they learned to use their software. When these people told us that they have no intention of changing the quality of what they submit, we began to feel discouraged and then very frustrated because there are so many of these books. Now most of us won't even try taking one of these scans because we dread what we'll get stuck with.I'm still sort of recovering after my last really messy validation. It was right on the border of being rejected, and it only ended up going through because I found a print copy and rescanned at least a third of the pages. No amount of credit would induce me to spend that much time and effort on a book with so many errors again. It's faster to rescan the book completely. As Mickey has pointed out in the past, there are some books in very good condition in that pile on step 1, so some sorting does need to take place. Getting rid of the ones that are unreadable will let us focus on the ones that are.Monica Willyard E. wrote:I am suggesting that we validators go through the books by submitters with poor records as quickly as possible. Reject those which need rejecting as quickly as possible so new validators do not get stuck with them. Get staff clear that we validators are only willing to put in so much time on one book when the submitter could have given a clean scan with a little up front care. Remember about a tenth of the books on step one were from such poor submitters in the recent past. I have not checked lately. Cleaning up step 1 rapidly means less of such books for new validators to stumble upon and find frustrating.E.__________ NOD32 2679 (20071122) Information __________ This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. <http://www.eset.com>http://www.eset.com
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