Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Cicconetti" <grythumn@gmail.com>
On 4/21/05, Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 04:42:56PM -0500, David Starner wrote:
On 4/19/05, Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> wrote:
I feel like I might be stepping on a hornet's nest, so please try to be gentle with me:
My questions are two:
1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long after proofreading was complete did this happen?)
Nobody really keeps track.
This is true. But, let me offer this completely personal, anecdotal evidence.
I've added 691 projects to the DP queue in the last couple years. Granted, many of them are still in the queue waiting to be release (maybe 25% or more). Out of those nearly 700 projects, 2 have been held up by missing pages. The first one was about a year and half ago and I can't remember anymore how that one was resolved. The other just cropped up last week. The images were taken from Cornell's Making of America project and they had one page scan in twice, overwriting one page. An e-mail sent to their administrators promised that they would fix it soon. I'm giving them until next week before I bug them again.
If my numbers are any indication ... around 0.29% of our projects will come up missing a page. I have a feeling it is a actually a point or two higher, but I could be wrong.
Josh
I have put nearly 1200 books through DP of which 876 have been posted to PG. The majority of those are ones that I have scanned, so I have control over dealing with things like bad scans. I have a handful of project (~5) that have problems with bad or missing pages. 3 of them are from the Million Books Project and were processed before we knew we had to be very careful about checking those scans. The others are from periodicals. I also have 3 books that I've scanned but not put on DP due to missing pages (I'm quite sure I'll run across another copy of those books reasonably soon). I know of another 4-5 cases where material was cut off on the scan (or on the actual page) and was obtained by other volunteers so that the project could be finished. I've had a couple of items where the material is so obscure that I've told the PPer to just mark the missing parts (usually just a piece of a page) and post it. Bulletin de Lille (a French twice-weekly newspaper published by the German occupiers of Lille during WWI) is the example that comes to mind. My impression is that missing pages/text are not a big problem in percentage terms at DP. But they do happen often enough that we have a procedure for dealing with them. We have some volunteers who have been remarkably responsive and helpful in finding missing pages or checking obscured text and who deserve unending thanks. I'm quite certain that these problems are more likely to be successfully resolved within the DP system, where we have methods for tracking them, than they would be if posted to PG where there is not yet a systematic way to find and work on them. JulietS DP Site Admin