About the Review Process

The reviewing process being used here is very simple, based on checking for the grammatical accuracy of the Latin - nothing more. When a reader is reviewed and given the "Gold Shield" at the TarHeelReader site, that means it is something that can be used for studying Latin. Whether it is something that is actually useful for you - as a teacher or as a student - depends on many other factors, based on your own goals and needs.

Here is how the reviewing process works:

1. New readers added. As new readers are added to the TarHeel site with the "latin" tag, they are tagged with Delicious as Latin TarHeelReaders. It's very important that you use the "latin" tag when you create your reader at TarHeel - otherwise, your reader will not be picked up for review. Other Delicious tags may also be added; see the Delicious blog post for more information about that. While it is awaiting review, items are tagged as "unreviewed" readers at Delicious.

2. Reviewers try to keep up! The two reviewers - Laura Gibbs and Evan Millner - will do our best to keep up with the arrival of new readers and review them quickly. In reviewing the readers, we will be looking for grammatical errors. If we notice tiny typographical errors we will fix them. The images used are not being reviewed; only the Latin text is being checked.

3. Reviewed and recommended. If a reader is grammatically correct, here is what happens:
* the "Gold Shield" is added at the TarHeelReader website, and shows up when you browse through the Latin readers at that site
* the Delicious tag "unreviewed" is changed to "reviewed recommended" (but remember, that recommendation is just based on Latin grammar, nothing more)
* a blog post is created here for people to leave comments - we might have missed a typo or other error in the review process, so please leave a comment on the blog post if we did!

4. Reviewed and reclassified as quasilatin. Sometimes a reader does not make sense in Latin, and in these cases, it is reclassified as quasilatin. You can read this post about quasilatin readers to learn more about that.

5. Reviewed and not recommended. Very rarely, it can happen that there is a Latin reader which is grammatically correct (more or less), but which is written as a kind of inside joke, or based on purely personal interests of some kind, perhaps related to a specific class. This may also be used for readers which use the Latin words in a grammatically correct way but which are consistently not idiomatic Latin (the reviewers can make corrections to grammar, but they cannot reliably make changes in choice of idiom). These readers are tagged as "reviewed" at Delicious, but not recommended, and they do not get the "Gold Shield" at the TarHeelReader website. If you have written a reader which falls into this category and would like to have it re-reviewed, please follow the procedures for re-review as set out for the quasilatin readers.

Your feedback about these procedures would be much appreciated! As you can see, we are cobbling this together using different tools that - I hope - will make the TarHeelReaders as accessible and useful as possible. If you have any ideas about how to improve this process, please leave a comment here at the blog.