Hi All,
Sorry for a slightly negative email, but I am finding that I am getting
less and less confident with being able to feel that the copyright dates
of
Bookshare books are in fact accurate (e.g., one of the new books from
this
morning or last night indicates in the description that it has evidence
supporting one of its claims that is from 2014 but the copyright date
listed
is 2012).
In many of the searches I have done, I find at least a few bad
copyright
dates. Although this is not a big deal for things like pleasure reading,
it
is a serious problem (for me at least) with respect to nonfiction texts,
especially those I want to use with my students. For example, if I tell
my
students that we will be using the 2014 version of book x for class, and
Bookshare indicates it is the 2014 version, but it is actually from 2010,
it
could be quite different from the 2014 version and thus things such as
exam
questions from the text may be marked incorrect and thus students may
fail
the course simply because of the lack of awareness of the version
difference. Likewise, if I am writing a scientific paper and cited one of
these books with an incorrect copyright date, it reduces my credibility
in
my area of training.
I realize that we can and should provide reports of the books to the
staff
but this would involve my submitting multiple reports, sometimes daily of
these books. It seems like they either need to increase their staff or
need
to have volunteers help with this issue. They have lots of us as
volunteers
and I know I for one would be happy to help with this type of correction.
I think by posting so many new books so fast, they are overwhelming
themselves and risking decreased quality of the product they are turning
out. I for one would prefer a thorough check of books to ensure as much
accuracy as possible over the sometimes hundreds of new postings per day.
Again, I sincerely apologize for the non-positive email, I just needed
to
vent a little:) as I have seen this happening quite a bit and do not
really
know anymore what I can assume is accurate in terms of this info.
Have a great rest of the week!
Chris
Christine M. Szostak, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Shorter University
Rome, Georgia
szostak.1@xxxxxxx
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