[bksvol-discuss] Re: Requirements for acceptance -- the bottom line
- From: Cindy <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 21:24:59 -0700 (PDT)
From the posts I've been reading I think most people
do appreciate Excellent quality and that your work in
cleaning up books and making them the way you would
want to read them is appreciated. I get the feeling
that more people would prefer a smaller collection of
excellent books than a larger collection of unreadable
books.
Anyway, please don't give up. Do what you want to do
to make the books the way you would like to have them
to read. Maybe I'm selective -- I read and take to
heart those requests for copies with few errors and
skip over other comments and go on to the next post.
And I take the time to read carefully and correct as I
go along. Of course, I'm fortunate in that I'm now
retired and am not a student, and my children are
grown and gone, so I have the time -- and one thing I
appreciate about bookshare is that there is no time
limit in getting books into shape (as long as we
remember to renew them). I know some people would like
them more quickly, and books that are in good shape
from the scanner and are not 600+ or 800+ or 1500" can
be approved and uploaded quickly. So, as I think Mary
said, if the scanner would do a fair amount of
pre-submission validating the validator could do a
good job of --dare I say it in Jesse's hearing? (grin)
perfecting the book and still get it into the
collection in a reasonable amount of time.
Cindy
--- Silvara <silvara@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have a couple of points that I'd like to discuss.
> What is readable is very subjective. As you stated
> Mary, what is considered
> readable to one person can be totally frustrating
> for another. The example
> about the term paper perfectly illustrates my
> feelings in this matter. I
> too, would like to know if it's possible to raise
> the quality standards for
> bookshare. I totally love this idea of bookshare and
> how we can have instant
> access to a wide variety of books. But I strongly
> feel that quality is
> important. After all, bookshare is not a free
> service. If we don't pay
> cash, we pay with our time.
>
> About 3 months ago I noticed that there were a lot
> of books waiting to be
> validated. Thus, over the past 3 months I've spent
> a lot of my free time
> validating. I've validated thirty something books
> during this period. I
> spent time doing some basic cleaning up so that
> these books could be even
> better. However, the comments by the powers-that-
> be, during this week has
> lead me to feel that my efforts to improve the books
> were a waste of my
> time, and worse, not appreciated. I can not
> consciously approve books
> knowing that with a little extra time spent on the
> clean up process, the
> book's quality can approach near-perfection. Thus,
> the result is that I
> will have to think about how much time I want to
> devote to bookshare in the
> future.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 8:03 PM
> Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Requirements for
> acceptance -- the bottom line
>
>
> > Ah yes. the notion of what is readable is the rub
> in all of this. Richard,
> I love your idea about the volunteers and
> validating.
> > But getting back to the idea of readable,
> consider, if you will, what
> would happen to you if you turned in a term paper,
> let's not even discuss a
> thesis or disertation, just a garden variety term
> paper, and that paper had
> > a bunch of cross-outs, scribblings, maybe a few
> coffee stains obscuring
> some of the text. What are the chances, do you
> suppose, that you would get
> anything but an F on that messy paper, 95 or even 98
> percent of
> > which might be perfectly readable? Why the heck
> should people pay for
> anything less than the high end of "good" quality?
> Why shouldn't we as
> submitters of materials take enough pride in what we
> submit to want to
> > make it truly readable, i.e. containing some
> errors, but not so many that
> the meaning of entire passages is garbled?
> Obviously, if you have an old
> book with a bad font that just won't ocr well,
> there's not a lot you can
> > do. I've got such a book that I keep trying,
> hoping that the next
> iteration of K1k will unlock the key to the crummy
> Soviet-era font and paper
> on which the book was printed, so that I can
> actually enjoy reading the
> > book myself and have a decent enough scan to post
> for anybody else crazy
> enough to want to read this particular volume.
> <smile>
> > Somebody posted a question asking about how the
> standards were decided
> upon, or words to that effect. I too would be
> interested in that, and would
> like to know if there is anything that we can do to
> revisit the issue
> > and get them raised. The word "readable" means
> very different things to
> different people, it would seem. Otherwise, we
> wouldn't have titles on the
> system with portions that are totally garbled and
> not at all readable.
> > Mary
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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