I think to a certain extent, a number of people on the list are venting. While constructive criticism can be productive, hostility and anger doesn't really help, it just raises the blood pressure to a dangerous level. A number of the problems Bookshare is under going are due to growing pains. Bookshare over the years has also had a difficult time retaining volunteer coordinators, and the lack of response to issues brought up on this list can be directly attributed to the present lack of such an individual. While it is nice when other staff members, are able to jump in, and answer some of the questions brought up here, I can also understand why they can't, and don't want to, address all the points discussed on the list. In case you haven't noticed, the members on this list can be a bit verbose at time. It will certainly be nice when Bookshare is able to fill the coordinator position to give us a point of contact. When they do get a volunteer coordinator, I would hope one of their first tasks would be the consolidation, and updating, of the instructions for volunteers, so it isn't necessary to look in 2 or 3 different locations for the S.O.P. and alleviate some of the same questions being asked on a weekly basis by new members. This would also serve to introduce the coordinator to the process expected of the volunteers. Regarding our favorite whipping boy, the infamous stripper, in my humble opinion, it is nothing but a pain in the a55 at this time. I suspect, that it was either written in a programming language that the current engineers don't do, and / or the comments are so poor, that no one wishes to tackle it. If the decisions were mine to make, I would ditch the present stripper, only accept RTF submissions, and develop a preprocessing package that would attend to section breaks, smart quotes, font size, check for page breaks, strip graphics, check quality, etc., but ...
Dave At 08:40 AM 5/30/2008, you wrote:
You are right Tracy.The thing that is most disturbing to me is the lack of response from bookshare staff. They could say, as they have, we're working on it, forget it, this is due to be implemented immediately. Instead, nothing. To me that means lack of interest. In other words, it was good enough in the olden days, get used to it.All I can say is, that's wrong, wrong, wrong! Bob (whistling in the dark)
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