Satauna, When you upload the book to get bookshare's ranking, how do you get the book back to work on it? Jill ----- Original Message ----- From: "Satauna Howery" <sthowery@xxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 12:16 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Suggestion summary for Step 1
It seems to me we've had a lot of great suggestions come in recently as towhat might make Step 1 more manageable. I just wanted to synthesize some ofthem into one e-mail. 1. When validators release a book, make it possible for the validator whois releasing the book to comment, so that they might articulate why they'resending it back to step 1. "Not something I want to read... Not enough time to validate." etc. I think this would be first thing I'd implement. Another comment someone might write might be: "Missing pages 23-24. Submitted by bookshare volunteer, so I can't track them down. Can someoneelse get the book and add the missing pages? Otherwise it's a great scan and all clean." Comments like these are specific, and they'd give books with oneor two missing pages a chance to be added to the collection as opposed to being rejected because someone can't get the book or because the original submitter can't be reached. 2. Make it possible for a validator to upload their version of the file they've been working on back to Step 1. This way, they could release thebook after doing something to it, and in the comments field mentioned above,they could write in what they did so the next validator would know. This would also make it possible for someone who had OpenBook, for example, to download an .ark book, convert it, and upload the converted .rtf file back to Step 1 for another validator. 3. Resolve the infamous BookShare volunteer. Either assign a number to each volunteer who submits a book, or, better yet, require that submitters provide an e-mail address so that validators can get a hold of them. Thisdoesn't mean their names have to show up under the submission field once thebook is approved, but I think they should show up with e-mail addresses on the Step 1 page.4. This is a suggestion that I haven't seen mentioned, but it's something I employ on good or fair books that I download to validate, or on books whosesubmitters I don't know At this point, so far as I know, the personsubmitting a book has to decide what quality that book has. This means that someone can submit something of excellent quality and inadvertently rate itfair. It also means that someone can think their submission is perfectly awesome and give it an excellent rating when indeed it should have been rated fair. So, I do the following. A. Download the book. B. Go to step 2 and upload it. C. After uploading the book, the page appears that lists things like categories, and book quality. But now, the file has been run throughBookShare's spell-checking tools and it has a quality rating that I considermore realistic. Often I find this rating to be different than the ratingthe original submitter gave, and it gives me a clearer starting point when Ibegin validation. For example, if BookShare's tools rate it fair but the submitter thought it was excellent, then why is that? Are there lots of foreign language words? Is it really just a rotten scan? What's the deal? 5. I applaud the person who suggested spending more time validating and less time writing messages to this list that have nothing or little to do with improving BookShare and its collection. Is it really necessary for people to articulate what they're currently validating, or what books they've just uploaded for approval? Is it possible for people to write "me too" and "Thank you" to the person you want to agree with or thank instead of sending the one-liner to the list? I appreciate the community, but the hundreds of messages that go through this list are overwhelming.That's all I can think of for now. Happy validating, happy submitting, andhappy holidays to everyone. Satauna sthowery@xxxxxxx To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxput 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.-- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG.Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.17.2/1185 - Release Date: 12/15/2007 12:00 PM
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