Personally, I like having the ability to see a long synopsis when it is available, so I would be disappointed to see it illiminated. I just wanted to give my opinion in this unofficial and unsolicited E-mail poll. :-) Thank you for your answer about the textarea tag. Some html guides online must be incorrect, which I suspected since my tests with it didn't work. Could you tell me if there is a reason why textarea is used instead of input when input would allow for easy limiting of the number of characters entered? I know there may very well be a good reason for the other tag that I just don't know about. I know it will allow 200 characters as a length, because I tested that. Thanks. Sarah Van Oosterwijck curious entity at earthlink dot net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jesse Fahnestock" <Jesse.F@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 9:06 AM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] synopses, quality, etc. > 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will not stick: namely, books that have previously been submitted and approved, whether or not they have since been withdrawn.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 >