[nabs-l] Bookshare Experiences

[Courtney Stover]

Joe,

Bookshare's quality has improved exponentially.

There have been a number of new developments within the collection.
Firstly there are a number of publishing houses providing EPub copies
of their titles to bookshare; I can't produce a full list off the top
of my head, but if you'd like a list, I can give you the link to the
section of bookshare's site that has one.  The copy provided by
publishers is nearly flawless in terms of scanning quality.  There are
lacks; sometimes, page numbers aren't provided.  However, most of the
books provided are fiction, so it really doesn't matter.  As bookshare
partners with more university and other presses primarily publishing
research/scholarly matterial, they're looking in to methods to ensure
that page numbers are always present in these types of books.

Secondly, they've hired a number of independent contractors that now
scan a large majority of the books not provided by publishers.  The
woman in charge of approving books for inclusion in the collection
looks over these books carefully, and if there are a substantial
number of scanning errors, they're sent back for rescanning, and the
contractors aren't paid until they get it right.

Thirdly, bookshare is no longer accepting fair quality scans.  This
will reduce the issues with quality substantially.  Now, their only
ratings are good and excellent, and while selections rated good aren't
absolutely perfect, they're immensely better than fair.  Also, they're
replacing all fair quality submissions in the collection with
excellent scans through their independent contractors.

Finally, they've instituted something called a "quality report"  If a
book is reported as having substandard quality, it's reviewed by a
bookshare employee.  Usually, it's determined that these books need
rescanning, and within one to two months, an excellent copy resides in
the collection.

There are still volunteers scanning for the collection; however, the
woman approving books for the collection has really cracked down on
things like large blocks of text that are illegible or missing pages.
This means that often volunteer submissions are rejected, and the
volunteer is asked to rescan.  The volunteer submissions that make it
in to the collection are really good; and if you find an
unsatisfactory submission, a quality report should take care of the
problem.

If there are questions you have I didn't answer, let me know.
Courtney

On 7/2/10, Joe Orozco <jsorozco at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Can anyone share their experiences with Bookshare?  I let my subscription
> expire a couple years ago, and from what I remember, the selection was good
> but the quality only somewhat satisfying.  Now I see that NLS is listing
> Bookshare books as part of their Web Braille collection, which is a little
> annoying because I'd prefer books with no mistakes.  I know it must sound
> snobbish, but with the availability of Braille being so slim, the resources
> that are devoted to Braille I'd rather have clean copies of.  Has the
> quality improved?  Are there proofreading mechanisms in place to reduce what
> I once found to be glaring flaws?  Thanks for any information.
>
> Best,
>
> Joe
>
> "Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves,
> some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."--Sam Ewing
>
>
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