I've been thinking about what many of you have said. I can see both sides of this issue to a point. It leads me to some questions. Is it the nature of textbooks that they will scan poorly? Dr. Cross seems to do a very nice job with his, and some of those are over 1,000 pages. Is a poorly scanned textbook actually useful to a student? I don't know the answer to this since I scanned my own textbooks for college back in the early 90s. Maybe I'm just in a clutter clearing mood this week. In the past, I was more likely to take a scan rated good or fair if I could see the name of the submitter and knew I could contact that person. Even now, I'd take on a book with a warning that the book was a really tough scan, is a requested textbook for someone, or that it's a person's first few scans. Seeing a book uploaded by the infamous "a Bookshare volunteer" is sort of like poison ivy to me. I don't touch it unless I have to. A book marked as fair and that is anonymous as well is something I don't want to deal with unless I have tons of free time and nothing else to scan or validate. I used to spend weeks on such books, especially textbooks, and it made me feel stressed and sort of crazy trying to fix it all because I knew students would be using the books. I can't help but wonder if anyone even read those books. By the time I was able to validate them into legible shape, the person's class would have been over long ago.
Monica Willyard Grandma Cindy wrote:
Cindy Ray/Lou, You make some good points. Re number three, though--if the person who needs the text submitted it, he/she has it. If it's someone who asked for a scan, he/she can validate it and use it at the same time. smile
