[bksvol-discuss] synopses, quality, etc.

  • From: "Jesse Fahnestock" <Jesse.F@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 07:06:34 -0700

Hey all -- sorry I've been offline for some lively conversation! I'll try to 
weigh in where necessary. As always, please feel free to email me offline about 
any of these issues.

1. Synopses: Just to be clear, while I understand the desire for synopses, 
books missing one or both forms of synopsis should not be rejected on that 
basis, by volunteer or administrator. I have no problem with the urging and 
cajoling of our fellow volunteers to include them, but making them mandatory 
would simply be prohibitive and discouraging for some of our submitters, 
especially those who submit in bulk. 

2. The synopsis bug: There are a few cases where the synopsis being entered 
will not stick: namely, books that have previously been submitted and approved, 
whether or not they have since been withdrawn. In those cases the original 
synopses will stick. Validators are able to change the synopses on brand new 
submissions, however, so please don't be discouraged! The vast majority of your 
synopses are sticking. We're working on fixing it for books that have already 
existed on Bookshare.org, but it's been a tricky one.

3. Synopses from other sources: please do not copy synopses from Amazon.com or 
any other source, unless it is the same copy found on the book jacket. That is 
copyrighted material, and while it is "quotable" in a news context (like 
Alison's newsletter) it should not be used as the synopsis in our collection.

4. Site improvements: the categories issue is a long-standing one, and one 
we've spent a lot of time trying to plan for. While we do acknowledge the need 
for better category management, making changes would require a large amount of 
database work (not to mention likely manual recategorization), and, if it were 
not a completely robust solution, might need to be done over and over again. 
The full-scale answer is to change our metadata source entirely to something 
like what the library of congress uses. This change is probably a ways out 
still, but given our limited resources, it probably makes more sense to make 
that change once rather than try to take half-steps.

The notification for users of rejection reasons is on the way, I'm told. Look 
for it in a rejection notice coming to you soon! (grin)

The short synopsis field is a textarea field, and that does not accept the 
maxlength attribute. As Sara (I think) noted, fixing the length would require 
javascript, which is problematic for many users. I will float the idea for a 
single synopsis -- keep in mind that this will be displayed on the search 
results page, however, so it would still need to be pretty limited. You 
couldn't have a 100-word synopsis there.

5. Regarding text quality: I love the fact that this group has high standards 
-- I'm consistently amazed at the effort being put into the scans of others by 
our volunteers. But I'd encourage us to try to avoid accusatory messages when 
it comes to text quality. There are many mitigating factors, some of which have 
already been pointed out here, and we would be wrong to discourage anyone from 
submitting the books they want to share. So let's focus on ensuring the 
readability and legibility of what has been submitted, and of course 
encouraging our fellow scanners with tips and techniques as many of us already 
do.


________________________

Jesse Fahnestock
Collection Development Coordinator, Bookshare.org
www.bookshare.org

A Project of The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
480 S. California Ave., Suite 201
Palo Alto, CA 94306-1609  USA
(650)475-5440 x133
(650) 475-1066 FAX
jesse@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.benetech.org

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