N Wolcott writes:
Does DP have a post-processing crisis? With thousands of volunteers texts flow regularly through the OCR and first phase quickly. However there are several thousand books that have been in post processing over a year. Many of these are hard, but many are plain text.
I know that other people have commented on this, but I'd just like to state that from looking at the PGDP statistics, I don't believe that this is even close to true. There are about 2250 projects that have completed the first two rounds of proofing but not posted to PG, 400 are waiting for a PPer, 1600 are in post-processing, and 250 are waiting for verification. None of the 400 projects waiting for a post-processor have been the queue for more than a year, although it is possible that some have been checked out and returned to the queue one or more times and could be older than a year. Of the 1600 that are checked out for post-processing, only about 40 have been in the queue more than a year, and about half have been checked out to the current PPer for 60 days or less. Again, it is possible that several PPers have checked out particular projects so that the statistics make them appear newer than they actually are. Finally, I'd like to point out that most PGDP projects are now generating more than one version of the text, HTML and text, and some of the delays can be due to PPers waiting to get better copies of images. Two of my four post-processing projects that had images that were adequate for a text-only project, but inadequate for HTML, and I had to go back to the content provider for better images, and I need to do some image processing before I am done with the HTML edition.
Is it appropriate to re-scan a book to start the process over again hoping for better luck? One could clear another edition, etc.
It seems as though you have some specific projects in mind which have not made it through the DP post-processing process. If they are waiting for a PPer, volunteer to do it yourself, or if the project(s) have been languishing in the PP queues, try to contact the PPer directly, and if that fails, try to contact one of the PGDP powers that be, to see if you can get the project reassigned to you. The powers that be at PGDP do try to get PPers to complete the project within 90 days, or to give it up if they're not actively working on it. In any case, unless the other edition differs from the one that's in the queue, you're better off trying to work within the system before trying to restart the process from scratch.