[bksvol-discuss] Re: curious about Latest books

  • From: Denise Thompson <deniset@xxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:07:13 -0700

Thanks Mary
I'm glad staff is aware of the problem. It definitely starts to impact Bookshares effectiveness though if readers can't find books. Yes we can check a favorite author, but that's very limiting. There's no way to know about potential new books we might be interested in and new authors to choose from. Isn't there some way volunteers could work on categorizing the books? With the current situation, members aren't able to take advantage of the progress being made from publishers greatly increasing the numbers of books in the collection. The odd twist is that when we were scanning them ourselves we actually had more books available because we could at least identify them.
Denise

At 10:56 PM 9/6/2011, you wrote:
Hi Denise,

You're right. Publisher quality books are not categorized. They're automatically put into the collection after being cleaned up, and converted to daisy and braille by Bookshare's conversion tools. The choosing of categories seems to be something that requires the human touch at this point.

I guess the only way you could know about new books is to search by authors that you know write frequently in a particular genre.

Staff is very aware of this problem, and we're working on getting it fixed so that PQ books will have categories. We just don't know how that will happen yet. But we do know it's a pain in the neck not to have categories for books and want that to change too!

Mayrie




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From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Denise Thompson
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 5:19 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] curious about Latest books

Hi Folks
I'm cuious about how books are being added to the collection these days. I have a link set up to bring up the latest books to the collection in the categories of mistery and thrillers, romance, lit and fiction and westerns. It seems like now for quite a while we can go for days without any new books showing up. It stays the same. Yet I thought we were getting all these books added from publishers. So my question is are they just added and they aren't given dates or I've checked a number of them and they weren't categorized. So that's maybe why they don't show up. The new books must be being added some where. Like for example, Alter of bones has been the book on the top of my list and it hasn't changed since last thursday. And Justice by Karen Robards never did show up on my latest book list. I found it because I periodically look up favorite authors and see if their new book is there when I know it has come out and haven't seen it yet. Justice was in the collection and apparently came from the publisher. It was submitted by bookshare staff it says and it was not categorized. That's probably why it didn't show up. So if all of the books aren't being categorized how are we supposed to find them Especially if we don't always know the exact name, etc.
Denise

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