[bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
- From: "Paula and James Muysenberg" <outofsightlife@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 14:14:28 -0600
Marissa,
I think Bookshare has done a great job of dealing with this difficult
issue. It seems to me that the decision to wait until after March to
implement the new rule gives us the best of both worlds. We can work toward
improving the quality of the collection, while not rejecting books that have
already been scanned, and which, except for lack of page breaks, are in good
shape. I appreciate all the thought and hard work that must have gone into
formulating this policy.
Paula
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marissa Mika" <Marissa.M@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 1:58 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
> Hi Shelley,
>
> It's nice to have a tangible policy, huh? I really encourage you to get
> in touch with us over the next few months if you encounter a book that
> has either been scanned without page breaks, or if you find that what
> you're doing inadvertently strips the page breaks, we want to know so we
> can tailor our comprehensive tech support to deal with these issues.
>
> We wanted to ensure that there's enough lead time on this so we can
> generate the information you need and also to accept the work of people
> affected by this policy change.
>
> Thanks much,
> Marissa
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Shelley L.
> Rhodes
> Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:36 AM
> To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
>
> Thanks Marissa and John for this Clarification. I shall take it into
> account.
>
> And we can still submit the pageless books up till march for those
> sitting
> on the validation page.
>
> Thanks for the definitive answer.
>
> Shelley L. Rhodes and Judson, guiding golden
> juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Guide Dogs For the Blind Inc.
> Graduate Advisory Council
> www.guidedogs.com
>
> The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to
> stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.
>
> -- Vance Havner
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Marissa Mika" <Marissa.M@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 2:10 PM
> Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Word on Page Breaks from Jim Fruchterman
>
>
> Happy New Year, everybody! Jim Fruchterman writing here.
>
> I wanted to weigh in on the page break issue, since I've read some of
> the messages flying around and want to make sure folks know how
> seriously we take the input.
>
> First of all, many of you know that we did a big survey of our users.
> One of the major points we heard was to make a priority of improving the
> quality of our books. The two key aspects of quality are text accuracy
> and navigation. A great thing about our volunteer team has been the
> dedication to quality, and this has been important to customer
> satisfaction. For example, you probably are aware that there is an
> effort to upgrade the quality of all the "Fair" quality books in our
> collection to Good or Excellent. Thanks to you, we just surpassed
> 20,000 books live on Bookshare!
>
> Right now, the main navigation element in our books are pages, beyond
> words and paragraphs. Pages that have no page breaks are a problem,
> especially for the novice users we are increasingly trying to serve. I
> have seen the confusion on the faces on students and teachers when we
> open a book with no pages. So, we want to make sure that page breaks
> are part of the books we add to Bookshare.org. This is a priority for
> our broad base of users, and is important for responding to their
> quality needs. It's also critical in our support of the DAISY standard,
> since navigation capabilities are one of the main benefits of DAISY.
>
> When I agreed to the policy change to reject "one page books," it was
> because I understood that we were getting very few of them submitted.
> Almost all of our volunteers are submitting books that are fine. I also
> understood we were working with volunteers who were submitting books
> without page breaks to make sure they weren't lost in the post-OCR
> process. So, we didn't think this would be a big deal. I'm sorry if it
> seems like we weren't approaching this in a caring, Benetech-style way.
> It certainly is our intent to do this nicely (although the automated
> email process could use some tweaking, I'm sure!).
>
> To ensure that this policy decision works for you and to enhance the
> navigability of our books and to improve our standards, Bookshare will
> no longer accept "one page books" after the end of March 2005. We're
> hoping that this will give our volunteers enough time to adjust to this
> new standard and publish the hard work of our submitters and validators
> who have submitted books recently that lack page breaks.
>
> Scanned books come in without page breaks for two reasons:
>
> 1. They get dropped by accident during the post-OCR processing. The
> OCR packages put the page breaks into scanned books by default. Some
> editors will drop these page breaks.
>
> 2. They were done long ago and have no page breaks because they were
> edited out at the time.
>
> The first one is the important one. Our engineering team is working
> with the Bookshare.org ops team to figure out how page breaks get lost
> and how to avoid that. We'll draft some FAQs on page breaks to explain
> how to keep them in different editor scenarios. We think that this
> should be pretty easy to figure out and avoid losing the page breaks.
>
> The old books that don't have them are too much work to re-enter them by
> hand. We have a process for adding page breaks back in after a fixed
> number of lines, but it is not the ideal process. We would rather have
> these books in the collection than not have them, but we'd like to
> minimize this as much as possible.
>
> Thanks for working with us to make Bookshare.org as good as it can be.
>
>
> Jim Fruchterman
> President & CEO
> Benetech
>
> 480 California Ave, Suite 201
> Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA
> (650) 475-5440 x-106
>
> Fax: (650) 475-1066
> jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> www.benetech.org
>
> The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
> A nonprofit organization
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
> Version: 7.0.296 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005
>
>
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this outgoing message.
> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
> Version: 7.0.296 / Virus Database: 265.6.9 - Release Date: 1/6/2005
>
>
>
>
Other related posts:
