[bksvol-discuss] Re: Books rated excellent recently added to the collection that are really only good
- From: "Lora" <loravara@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:07:03 -0600
Hi Judy and Others,
I am always surprised when I download an excellent book and find that it's
definitely not. Although these books are frustrating discoveries, I think
the majority of Excellent books are deserving of that rating.
Getting a book up to that rating is a joint effort, though. Like you, I
appreciate the scanners' comments, explaining the validation steps that they
followed before submitting the book. It doesn't change my approach to
validating, but it informs me of how much time my validation process is
likely to take.
For what it's worth, I begin by searching for the number 1, in combinations
such as 1 1' 1. 1? And so forth.
I then search for random characters that typically don't belong in the book:
caret, accent, tilde, percent, pound, and so on. By finding these and
eliminating them, if appropriate, I get an overall glimpse of how much
validating needs to be done.
Spell-check or not to spell-check: I then make a determination on whether
I'll run the spellchecker. For most novels and nonfiction, I will; but for
books such as Buddhism in Action, where I'm battling two spelling problems,
lots of Hindi words and lots of scanographical errors that resulted in
actual words, I've determined that it isn't worth it to run spell check.
I'll rely on my full reading of the book to catch errors.
I then scan for common scanos, such as die for the and comer for corner. If
I don't find lots of these, I figure it's a good sign.
I usually then start reading the book. Since I'm going to read straight
through, this is when I check things like whether all the pages are there,
whether lines are missing, whether certain text is garbled, etc.
I've found that there are errors that are better caught with speech, and
other errors better caught with Braille.
Example: One excellent book I downloaded might have read all right with
Braille, but was a nightmare when I read it with speech. This was a book I
wanted to read, and one I did read, even though there weren't spaces after
quotation marks, resulting in things like, "I hate this,"she said. (Funny
thing is, JAWS reads this just fine, but my Pacmate tried to run this and
she together because there was no space. It did this all through the book,
because neither the scanner or validator went in and put spaces after the
quotation marks. This is the kind of thing we need to find good ways to
catch.
Finally, if the book has indices or other extras, I make a determination as
to whether they can be salvaged. I think I've only ever deleted one index,
which was very nearly garbled beyond recognition. It was for a very short
book, and I felt it didn't add much to the book.
As I'm uploading, I review everything that will be visible when the book
goes into the collection. For instance, I check the short and long
synopses, title, author, publisher, copyright date, ISBN, and the selected
categories and adult rating etc., to make sure it looks good.
I'm not saying I won't miss things, but this is the rough process I use.
One of my frustrations is when a scanner uploads a book and marks it as
excellent, and then I open the book and it's clearly not. I downloaded one
recently where I found lots of missing words or garbled lines, and I knew I
wouldn't be able to correct it easily. I simply returned the book to step
one, as I figured it'd take more effort to fix it than I felt I could
manage. I guess I could see how it might have gotten an excellent rating,
as there were good-sized chunks of very readable text, but when it went bad,
it was really bad. I'd appreciate an honest rating. The book probably
deserved good, which at least would have warned potential validators that it
would require a fair bit of work.
May I ask scanners how they determine whether to rate their submissions as
good or excellent?
And I'd love to see Bookshare scan the book on initial submission, and offer
a potential rating. Does it do this yet? I know it's something we've
talked about in the past.
Finally, I'd love to see a way to leave a comment as to why a validator
returned a book to step one. This could include comments such as: Frequent
Hindi words; not familiar enough to validate ... Or has lots of pictures
that will require interpretation by a sighted person ... Or even ... This
book has too many errors for me to validate at this time.
I hope there's value in some of this. Mostly, it's just me thinking
publicly.
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Judy s.
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:08 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Books rated excellent recently added to the
collection that are really only good
Let me add my 'ditto' to the complaints posted here today about books
entering the collection recently that aren't up to snuff.
I was just crabbing off-list to Grandma Cindy about this last week. I've
downloaded several books this last month that had just entered the
collection which had many obvious errors, but were rated excellent. I've
certainly missed stuff myself when validating, even though I read through
every single book I validate, but the errors I found in downloaded books
were things like chapter after chapter with "1" instead of "I" in the text.
As a validator, I appreciate scanners like Shelley and Mayrie (and many
others) who put in their comments whether or not they've read the scan
through, if they've spell-checked it, stripped headings, verified page
numbers and the like.
I'm much more likely to download a book from the step 1 list if that
information is available, because I know what to expect and can judge how
much time I will have to allocate to give that book the attention it might
need.
Judy s.
To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to
bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of
available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to
bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of
available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
Other related posts:
