Tracking consultant checking reports

Question

I have twice been asked recently as to whether there was a way to attach final consultant checking reports to a Paratext project. The idea being that in the future, that info would be preserved with the project. I am currently the admin for two organizations and consultant reports are simply stored on servers or in old filing cabinets or lost. Any suggestions as to best practice…

Answer 1

An idea… I’ve recently discovered that files placed in the [PTproject]\shared\ folder are propagated via S/R. There are some projects for which S/R is still a huge effort over existing internet paths, but for others it seems doable. It helps for data transfer that each file placed in this folder is “sent” once, and “received” only once per user, unless it gets edited.

Can anyone share pros or cons of this scenario? Seems like a PDF can be compressed pretty small if we’re not worried about its beauty.

KimB

Answer 2

Anecdotal: Large project sizes did cause problems for us in the past. When some of our projects grew to over 400mb in size, they would timeout or refuse to send for people who were trying to receive them for the first time. So it might be worth looking into the current size of your projects to see if that could be a factor in the future.

My recommendation: Where I work, we use a Team Drive on Google Drive. Each language has a place for these sorts of important official documents. Access can be granted to administrators, consultants, or team members as needed. Since each language uses the same file structure, it makes it easy for admins to find what they need.

Comments

KimB’s suggestion was the one that came to my mind since there is no way to attach anything to a Paratext project. I think I prefer using something like a Google drive folder since there is likely to be several consultant reports, and maybe a translation brief. The problem with putting other sorts of documents in a Paratext project is formatting and writing systems. We all like to format reports with headings and bullet points and other things that Paratext does not support.

It occurs to me that some sort of link between an external document and a Paratext Project is desirable. We did use the USFM \rem for some things like this. You could but some remark after the \id line that reads something like:
\rem Romans checked on Sept 22, 2022 by consultant Dr. Martin Luther. See report titled, Romans_iso-code_2022.docx. And then place all of the reports in the agreed location on the cloud somewhere.

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Yes, we have done this, sort of haphazardly over a long time period. The problem is that more than a few actual official reports have disappeared from where they were supposed to be stored (older paper ones as well as digital files)!

Having the consultant status for each book recorded in the book file keeps it permanently with the project, but it is tedious to go through each book in a project to check for \rem markers. I wonder if there could be a place in the Project Plan to place a Status note for each book that would contain the details (though not the full consultant report)?

Answer 3

It seems to be under-used or unknown, and maybe even deprecated, I don’t know, but there’s the \sts code in USFM as well. It’s basically a specialist rem for recording checking status.
Somewhere I once found a list saying you could put a digit followed by free check, with the digit being:
1 - early draft
2 - community/village checked
3 - consultant checked
4 - published
So our translations have things like:

\sts 3 Consultant checked  March 2019

The nice thing about \sts is that if you’re checking stories rather than chapters, you can put it in the middle of a chapter. At least that way you’re looking for just the specialist marker, not any old \rem

Comments

Well, these four stages are now managed by the project plan. Some organizations have four stages while others have six. If you want to mark what stage a book or chapter is in then that is what the project plan is for, so I would not be surprised that “\sts” has been deprecated. There are several videos on www.paratext.org describing how to configure a project plan and to mark progress. Unfortunately, the Project Plan feature does not solve the original question of how to keep track of consultant reports. Sounds like Rev79 might be a solution, but I have not seen it in action.

Answer 4

Another option would be Rev79 under “Key documents” (together with translation brief etc.). Project managers can give access.

Answer 5

I too vote for KimB’s suggestion. If the final consultant reports are saved as PDFs and dropped into the \shared\ folder, then these reports are automatically distributed and available to everyone. In PDF format they are less likely to be tweaked or edited.

The only reservation beyond “the project might get big” is a translator might accidentally delete files in the shared folder, and I believe that deletes the reports for everybody. So that is a consideration too.

Comments

Another, smaller option might be to store a spreadsheet in \shared\ that contains more than just date, passage, consultant: checkers’ names & any major recommendations, perhaps, along with a note as to where the full report is filed. An Admin could keep this up to date with a master copy stored with the reports separately on a project backup drive, in case the shared copy gets deleted.

Might not work for all teams/projects but it’s gotta be better than what we now have… a number of missing reports.