[bksvol-discuss] Re: synopses, quality, etc.

  • From: Guido Corona <guidoc@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 09:43:07 -0500

Thank you so much Jesse.

On the subject of my draconian proposal to reject postings based on the 
artistry of synopsis,  that was a complete straw-man,  which I sometimes 
call an 'intellectual irritant'.  I was fully expecting the idea to be 
vehemently rejected by volunteers and staff alike,
after some furious discussion on the subject.  I am happy to say I did 
succeed beyond belief!

About quoting Amazon:  agreed,  we should not quote Amazon in synopsis, 
but we can look at Amazon book summaries and extremely-loosely paraphrase 
them,  or draw inspiration from them,  without making the attribution 
obvious, or even guessable.

A mechanism for volunteers to go and fix book records after books have 
been published, to update summaries,  correct authors, titles, ISBN and 
the like will be extremely welcome.

In the meantime,  I invite volunteers who would like some help with the 
creation of synopsis to post their requests to the list,  with a 
subjectline somewhat like:

Synopsis help wanted:  Satura by Aloysius WQ. Schmaltzenstein Gavronsky

Some of the most tediously verbose volunteers like myself may often be 
delighted to assist.

Guido
 

Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center,  Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone:  (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx

Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html





"Jesse Fahnestock" <Jesse.F@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent by: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
04/29/2004 09:06 AM
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Hey all -- sorry I've been offline for some lively conversation! I'll try 
to weigh in where necessary. As always, please feel free to email me 
offline about any of these issues.

1. Synopses: Just to be clear, while I understand the desire for synopses, 
books missing one or both forms of synopsis should not be rejected on that 
basis, by volunteer or administrator. I have no problem with the urging 
and cajoling of our fellow volunteers to include them, but making them 
mandatory would simply be prohibitive and discouraging for some of our 
submitters, especially those who submit in bulk. 

2. The synopsis bug: There are a few cases where the synopsis being 
entered will not stick: namely, books that have previously been submitted 
and approved, whether or not they have since been withdrawn. In those 
cases the original synopses will stick. Validators are able to change the 
synopses on brand new submissions, however, so please don't be 
discouraged! The vast majority of your synopses are sticking. We're 
working on fixing it for books that have already existed on Bookshare.org, 
but it's been a tricky one.

3. Synopses from other sources: please do not copy synopses from 
Amazon.com or any other source, unless it is the same copy found on the 
book jacket. That is copyrighted material, and while it is "quotable" in a 
news context (like Alison's newsletter) it should not be used as the 
synopsis in our collection.

4. Site improvements: the categories issue is a long-standing one, and one 
we've spent a lot of time trying to plan for. While we do acknowledge the 
need for better category management, making changes would require a large 
amount of database work (not to mention likely manual recategorization), 
and, if it were not a completely robust solution, might need to be done 
over and over again. The full-scale answer is to change our metadata 
source entirely to something like what the library of congress uses. This 
change is probably a ways out still, but given our limited resources, it 
probably makes more sense to make that change once rather than try to take 
half-steps.

The notification for users of rejection reasons is on the way, I'm told. 
Look for it in a rejection notice coming to you soon! (grin)

The short synopsis field is a textarea field, and that does not accept the 
maxlength attribute. As Sara (I think) noted, fixing the length would 
require javascript, which is problematic for many users. I will float the 
idea for a single synopsis -- keep in mind that this will be displayed on 
the search results page, however, so it would still need to be pretty 
limited. You couldn't have a 100-word synopsis there.

5. Regarding text quality: I love the fact that this group has high 
standards -- I'm consistently amazed at the effort being put into the 
scans of others by our volunteers. But I'd encourage us to try to avoid 
accusatory messages when it comes to text quality. There are many 
mitigating factors, some of which have already been pointed out here, and 
we would be wrong to discourage anyone from submitting the books they want 
to share. So let's focus on ensuring the readability and legibility of 
what has been submitted, and of course encouraging our fellow scanners 
with tips and techniques as many of us already do.


________________________

Jesse Fahnestock
Collection Development Coordinator, Bookshare.org
www.bookshare.org

A Project of The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity
480 S. California Ave., Suite 201
Palo Alto, CA 94306-1609  USA
(650)475-5440 x133
(650) 475-1066 FAX
jesse@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.benetech.org

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