Tracy, I agree that some books are technical enough to justify a longer
validation time even if the scan was good. I recently took 8 or 10 weeks
for "evolutionary analyses". The scan was excellent, but the scientific
terminology was somewhat daunting though I was interested enough to read it
as it filled in some knowledge gaps in my biology and biological
anthropology courses. There were many of those end-of-line hyphens that had
to be removed. Besides, I found that it was an intense read which was
tiring after a chapter so you can imagine that I didn't read the entire book
in one sitting even if I could have done so with my work and school
schedule.
Cheryl Fogle MA Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, University of New Mexico
I want to say that, while 30 days is perfectly reasonable for most books, that's not always the case. I can think of 3 books I have done fairly recently that took a month or more, and I wasn't "poring over every word". They were just very large, and in need of a bit of work. Further, they were not in such bad shape that they deserved rejection, and, had I been that silly, most likely no one would have bothered to rescan them.
Quantity is good. Quality is good. In fact, I'm all for it. Quickness of turn-around is also good, but, if I have to choose between quality and quickness, I'll take quality every time. And if my efforts can make a book more readable, without me having to read every word, then I'm all for it and that's what I do.
Oh, I left out another thing that can stretch time--those bosses of mine! They keep giving me work to do! Don't they realize that they pay me my healthy salary so that I can validate books for Bookshare?! And there are only so many hours in a day one can spend at a computer.
Tracy
On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Jake Brownell wrote:
Hi E,
While there are possibly some issues that are indeed more important than
validation time, if we do not attempt to maintain a quick turn around
through the system, then BookShare loses part of its advantage.
The initial message suggested a longer validation time and in response
to that we have moved on to max times of validating. I would support such a
max time provided that in rare cases for practical purposes the time can be
extended. I think though the difficulty lies in finding a way that will
A. not be abused
B. not be granted lightly
and C. that will not take away from already scarce staff resources.
I too, have seen books that were renewed and renewed to only end up not
being validated. I think that those validators who poor over every word of a
book that is already in great shape is great because the scan will be that
much better, however, I urge them to remember that there are far lesser
quality books that are making their way into the collection that could
really use that type of work.
One reason I do not do much validating is that without access to Kurzweil
1000's Rank Spelling it is difficult without reading a majority of a book to
really tell the shape it is in. Hopefully this will change in the future and
I'll do more than just scan, but I still have a couple hundred titles on my
list to scan, so I'll still be busy for a while yet. *grin*
Jake
----- Original Message ----- From: "E." <thoth93@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 12:22 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: renewing books you're validating
I agree. Sometimes I quickly validate a book. Sometimes it takes longer
than a week. There are worse issues to be addressed than keeping a book
out for a few weeks to validate.
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