Hi, Sue. I'm not sure that lax validating is the root of the issue,
though it may be relevant in some cases. In addition, I think it is
sometimes appropriate to sacrifice excellent quality when to achieve
that goal would take literally 5 hours or more to bring a book to
that standard. Those 5 plus hours can be better spent validating
several other books whose submitters took time to submit quality
scans. The concept of book validation was designed to assure basic
integrity standards are met and that the copyright law is
honored. It is both unfair to other submitters and a poor use of
resources to spend an inordinate amount of time fixing small errors
when the text is legible. I generally will not spend more than 5
hours on book validation for any single book unless there are special
circumstances.
looking at some of the books that are rated as good, they appear to
be books that lurked on step 1 for a long time. I suspect that
they're validaters let them go through as good because of 2
factors. One is the quality of the submissions, and the other is the
subject matter. Several of us are actively working on and resolving
older books from step 1, including the books in txt format. These
books tend to be either in rough shape or boring as watching bricks
dry. Sometimes they're both. It's why they've been hanging around
on step 1, and it would take a great deal of effort to make them into
excellent scans. Books rated good are often quite legible, and I
personally will let some books go through that way if they can be
fully understood. I weigh the return for investment knowing that
sometimes it's more important to make a book available to members
than to let it sit unread on step 1. I do a spell check of these
books and remove headers, but some of them require the services of a
dedicated, full-blown proofreader to make them excellent, and I don't
fit the bill. (smile) If we don't let the submissions go through as
good, we have 3 options. None of them is particularly appealing. We
could release the book back to step 1, thus returning it to book
purgatory. We can reject the book though Bookshare clearly does not
approve of rejecting legible scans. The last option is to spend time
correcting the scan line by line. I'll do that on occasion with
certain books that I'm really involved in and am enjoying. For books
about corporate economics and the literary meaning of essays written
in the seventeenth century, line by line editing is as appealing as
having my dentist use his drill. I'm glad Bookshare makes it
possible for us to choose how and when to draw the line in cleaning up scans.
Monica Willyard
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