Hi, Elizabeth. You are thoughtful to put this list together. Some of those books do need to be dealt with. To add to your list of possible problem books, there is a series of mysteries by Pat Welch that are all rated good and all have the same set of issues with parts of sentences cut out, lots of stray characters, and some consistent scannos that could be fixed with an adjustment to brightness settings. The reason I stopped tackling these particular types of books is that many of them were done by the anonymous Bookshare volunteer and cannot be contacted with offers of help. If I see poorly scanned books with a name attached, I do take the time to see if I can help. For the anonymous books, I think it's a waste of good validaters' time to try to fix them. If we do fix them up after investing a lot of time, these anonymous submitters will submit more books in the same quality because their books are getting approved. They will have no incentive to ask for help or to ask why people have a problem with their books.
I've heard it said that what we focus on grows. Where we focus our attention and effort is the part of a garden that will flourish. I believe that we should reward good scanning with faster approval times. As long as there are well-scanned books to be worked on, why set those aside for obviously messed up ones? For example, I validated a pristine scan Jake had done of a Hardy Boys book last night. The whole thing took me roughly 90 minutes to do because I read the whole book. I could have done it in ten minutes if I hadn't wanted to read the story. This scan had been sitting on step 1 for months without being touched. By letting it sit for so long, what did we subtly teach Jake about the importance of his careful work?
I do realize that we'll need to deal with the poor scans eventually. I also know we need to tell new volunteers to look for easier books to start on so they can learn how things work. I think if we truly rejected the books that need it, Claire might go into shock for a bit because I'd predict she'd have around 30 to 40 books in the rejection queue to process.
Monica WillyardTo unsubscribe from this list, send a blank Email to bookshare-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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