[bksvol-discuss] Write Your Bookshare Memoir...
- From: Scott Rains <scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:10:26 -0700
Hi Robert,
Great question. Send it to:
scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Scott Rains
Benetech Fellow, Bookshare Volunteer Department
________________________________________
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of robert tweedy [roberttweedy@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 11:56 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Request: Write Your Bookshare Memoir...
Scott where do we send to?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Rains" <scottr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 12:52 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Request: Write Your Bookshare Memoir...
... or maybe just the abridged version of your memoir for now.
We are writing new material supplemental for volunteers 1that is
supplemental to the online manual. Right now we are working on collecting
some volunteer biographies to give new volunteers a glimpse of life inside
Bookshare. You have seen a sneak preview in the bios of in-house volunteers
I have posted this week. Below are two more.
We are looking for short essays that are about midway between the length of
the two below and that engage readers by address the following three topics:
1) A bit about yourself and why you are at Bookshare
2) The tasks you have done at Bookshare
3) A little about what you feel you have contributed or learned
Not all submissions will be included in this document for new volunteers but
others inside Bookshare who run the website, blog, Twitter and Facebook
pages want a chance to give you well-deserved recognition also.
Thanks for your help.
Scott Rains
Benetech Fellow, Bookshare Volunteer Department
________________________________________
First Bio:
Hi, my name is Shaila Jain and am a sophomore at Monta Vista High School in
Cupertino. I am volunteering at Bookshare to help visually impaired people
gain easy access to books. I am helping Bookshare to organize their
library, write synopsis, backlogging, and to file paperwork. I have learned
how you take a book, cut the spine off, and scan it onto the computer. Then
the scanned copy is uploaded onto the Bookshare website. Bookshare has
provided me a great learning experience and I want to continue to volunteer
and learn more.
Second Bio:
My name is Mark Lind-Hanson and I have been a Bookshare volunteer for about
a month.
I have a background as a musician, artist and writer, and also ten years of
experience working in nonprofit administration. I came to Booksahare because
the
organization seems to be filling a very important need in the community, and
as someone who has a love for books, the organization’s mission to bring
more books to the attention of print-disabled persons is highly appealing
to my own sense of social purpose. Currently I work part-time for Book
Buyers, a used bookstore in Mountain View, and on one day a week I
contribute some time to Bookshare.
What I have been doing has been editing metadata for books submitted for
approval.
A book’s metadata includes the title, author name, ISBN number, copyright
date and copyright holder, as well as a short an a long synopsis. Often
these are provided by publishers as scanned data, and as scanned data, often
there are numerous errors- “scannos”- to be corrected, so that persons
reading them will be able to make complete sense of the information. For
instance, a sentence in quotations will often include run-on words, hyphen
or emdash errors, and spacing problems. These all need to be cleaned up, as
well, the short synopses are often cut off due to character length. My work
includes fitting as much as I can into the short synopses about the book
without leaving it incomprehensible, as well as editing the long synopses
(often including the very same errors, for the short synopsis is most often
just a reprise of the first sentence or two of the long one). I also check
whether the book is considered “adult content” or not, and what categories
(up to four) that it ma
y belong in. This is where my work as a bookstore shelver has come in very
handy.
Prior to working for Bookshare, as well as the Mountain View bookstore, I
worked for five years as Volunteer and Finance Assistant for the Friends of
the San Francisco Public Library. My many years of service there I feel has
well prepared me for a life working with books, and I do hope to learn an
awful lot more about electronic books, how they are formatted, and also,
Bookshares streams of distribution.
I find this a very exciting opportunity for me in terms of personal and
career growth, and am very honored to be able to serve the community in this
manner. The more books that are made available to print disabled persons,
the further their own personal horizons may be stretched. This cannot but
help in a very positive fashion with the difficulties faced each day in the
larger world. To have books at your disposal at the click of a mouse is
truly an improvement over days of yore.
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