[bksvol-discuss] Re: question about copyright verification
- From: "Gerald Hovas" <GeraldHovas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 15:02:12 -0500
Sarah,
As I've explained on the list in the past and in one of the tips on Jake's
website, Bookshare hasn't added additional requirements to make you jump
through hoops to verify data. Based on talks with the staff, though, it's
obvious that some volunteers don't know how to fill out the form correctly.
They enter the wrong information or don't bother to verify that the
information entered matches the book during validation. Because of these
volunteers, Gustavo sometimes questions valid info because it's not what
he's expecting and kicks it back to Step 1 for verification. Sometimes he's
spotted an error and doesn't bother to be specific about what he found, and
at other times I think he's just looking for reassurance that the volunteer
understands what they're doing. In some instances he may also just be
trying to make a point to certain people that they need to do a better job
when he could probably fix the errors himself.
There's also an issue here related to trust with the authors and publishers.
Bookshare's ability to make books available is due to the cooperation of
publishers in sponsoring the change to copyright law which makes Bookshare
possible. As part of their help, they asked for certain guarantees to make
sure their authors and business wasn't hurt due to the distribution of their
books via this type of service. Bookshare has gone to a lot of effort to
not only put measures in place to help keep the service from being abused,
but goes to extra effort to make sure that the data entered for a book is
correct. This cautiousness related to taking a volunteer's word that they
have entered the data correctly and know what they are doing sometimes
causes the approval process to be more difficult than we might like. It's
the price we have to pay occasionally to have access to the books.
OK, what can you do to minimize the impact to your own volunteering? Well,
of course you should double check everything on the form before uploading
the book. This can prevent you from having a book kicked back due to an
error which you made yourself. You can also provide information in the
comments to reassure Gustavo that you have done a proper job. For example,
adding comments to let him know that you went to the trouble to double check
the information on the form or adding comments to assure him that you
understand concepts like copyright. By that I mean don't just tell him "I
verified it when he asks for verification". Tell him HOW you verified the
information. This might be by looking up the copyright information on
copyright.gov or verifying the title or author on a publisher's website or a
well-known site which sells books like Amazon. It might also be as simple
as copying and pasting the copyright notice into the comments field to make
it easy for Gustavo to glance at and see it for himself. The last thing
Gustavo wants to do is have to open up a book and go looking at the scan to
see what information is there, especially when he has a large backlog due
to focusing on other responsibilities or being out of the office for needed
personal time.
Now do you have to do these things for every book? No. As I said,
Bookshare hasn't added additional steps to the volunteering process. It's
possible though that if you do the very minimum however, that you run the
risk of having a book kicked back due to Gustavo playing it safe. Most of
the time it won't come back to haunt you, but occasionally it will, and in
rare instances it doesn't matter how much trouble you might go to because an
admin is only human and will occasionally kick a book back by mistake.
Now what are some of us doing to help the situation from a volunteering
standpoint. We're attempting to get Bookshare to release better
instructions/guidelines for volunteering. Carrie began the effort a year
ago by getting permission to write and post guidelines for entering data on
the forms. This info is posted on Jake's website. I have recently updated
this info to include fields which she assumed everyone would understand,
like the copyright fields, and provided some examples to demonstrate how to
determine what information should be entered. We hope to get this finalized
and posted soon. Several of us have also been working on a more extensive
upgrade to the volunteering instructions which we hope to get the staff's
help on with finalizing and releasing to the volunteering community. This
revision is based on things we've learned through the bksvol-discuss list
and by talks with the staff, as well as by digging through all of the
available information which is scattered through out the website and a few
other documents to which the staff gave us access, like the information
they've prepared for conferences and schools. I'm sorry if this doesn't
happen to address the issue to your satisfaction, but this is the best the
Volunteer Tech Advisor group can do at this time to help.
HTH
Gerald
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sarah J. Blake
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2006 1:13 PM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] question about copyright verification
I've tried asking this several times and am not sure if I'm just missing the
answer in the volume of mail or if it hasn't been answered... I often have
books kicked back to step 1 with the message, "please verify the author" (or
editor or copyright holder). I am unsure why this is necessary since this
information matches in the submission information and in what appears in the
scan. Is this some kind of new requirement we're supposed to do in the
validation process, going to the Library of Congress and searching for this
info? I have looked all over the Bookshare iste for the validation
instructions to try and find this out for myself, and I'm not finding those
either. I would really appreciate an answer to this. I enjoy validating, but
not when I have to waste a lot of time verifying information that is in
plain site. I could understand it if the information in the submission and
the scan did not match; but it does seem like the validation process is
becoming more and more arduous. It's very discouraging to spend a long time
reading through a book, correcting errors that don't go through the spell
checker, etc, only to have it show back up on the step 1 page because I
didn't know I was supposed to go look on the LOC page for info that's
already there.
Sarah J. Blake
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