LIBRARY SERVICES - THE SINGAPORE EXPERIENCE
This paper traces the development of Library services of the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH) over the last 21 years and the progress we have made thus far.
The Braille and Talking Book Library of the SAVH, now under the ambit of its Communications Department, was officially opened in 1978.
The main objective of our Library is to ensure that people who are blind, vision impaired or print disabled have access to the same range of books and information for employment, education, leisure and personal enjoyment as their sighted counterparts.
In the past 21 years, the Library has endeavoured to do its utmost to meet the reading needs of its members. To this end, a sound-proof recording studio, Studio TWO, aptly named after a generous donor Mr T.W. Ong, was set-up in 1982. Volunteers were roped in to record books on reel tapes. These were then transferred onto 2-track cassette tapes for loan to Library members. We are now concentrating on locally written books.
To increase our collection of Talking Books, we also made purchases of commercially available titles, mostly through Borders book store. To date, we have approximately 850 Talking Book titles in our collection.
To increase the range of audio materials, the Library also produced three audio magazines, namely, Infomag (a weekly magazine on three 60-minute cassette tapes comprising articles from the local papers), English Digest (a monthly magazine on two 60-minute cassette tapes comprising articles of general interest from magazines such as Far Eastern Economic Review, Reader's Digest, etc) and Mandarin Digest (a monthly magazine on one 90-minute cassette tape comprising articles and news of general interest in Mandarin). We now have a subsidiary studio for the production of these magazines. However, subscription for these magazines has remained low with 41 for Infomag, 35 for the English Digest and 10 for the Mandarin Digest.
To meet the needs of members who preferred to read, the Library purchased most of its Braille books from abroad - mainly from the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Scottish Braille Press. To date, we have a total of 386 Braille book titles in our collection. However, we have decided not to expand our Braille book collection as we have limited storage space.
Library services have evolved considerably over time. Apart from providing the traditional books and magazines, many libraries now provide video and audio tapes, compact discs, CD-ROMs, on-line catalogues and access to information via the Internet.
As library services have become more technologically driven, it is essential that we work together with information and service providers, community agencies and other public libraries to provide these services. Our role would be to use our expertise in the area of visual impairment to add value for people who are blind or vision impaired to assist them in accessing information from these sources.
However, until such time as we are able to convince public libraries and community agencies of the need to provide specialised services and assistive devices for the visually handicapped, the Association was duty-bound to provide these services for the benefit of our Library members.
Hence, many new facilities were added to our Library in the past few months - thanks to a generous legacy. These include:
- Access to assistive devices e.g. Window-Eyes screen reader and DECTalk Express speech synthesizer, ZoomText screen enlarger, SmartView CCTV, and Omni-1000 Optical Character Recognition software to assist Library members with their reading and reference work.
- Access to the Internet for research and information gathering.1.
- Talking Books in alternative formats such as Compact Discs and Mini Discs. We felt that these alternative formats was a cheaper option to implement since many of our Library members have access to a compact disc player while an increasing number of them have access to a mini disc player. Besides, the cost of compact discs and mini discs has gone down over the years. We have not considered other options such as Daisy with PlexTalk owing to its relatively high cost..
- Descriptive Videos. Visually impaired persons can now listen to the description of action sequences and costumes, etc. when watching a movie. Many have expressed great satisfaction with this service since it gives them a better understanding of the movie. They can either watch these videos in our Library or borrow them home to watch at their leisure provided they have NTSC playback on their T.V. sets. To date, we have 70 descriptive videos in our collection.
One major problem we face is the import of these videos. As a result of copyright issues, we are unable to purchase them directly from any source be it in the United States or the United Kingdom.
FUTURE PLANS
We hope to add at least one Braille Display unit to one of the computers in our Library. We also hope to provide a conducive environment for students to use our facilities to conduct their own research work either through the Internet or through CD-ROMs.
In conclusion, we believe that timely delivery of information is a major issue and our mission is to provide information to visually handicapped persons in as many formats as would suit their requirements. This could range from audio-tapes, hard-copy Braille, disks for output through screen readers or large print displays, soft-copy Braille for output through Braille displays or other Braille palmtop computers, audio-recordings of synthetic speech or via e-mail. However, providing timely delivery of information may not always be possible as many of our members may not have easy access to or do not own assistive devices owing to its relatively high cost. Besides, they must also be adequately trained to operate these devices. Nevertheless, we are making some progress in encouraging our visually impaired population to move toward acquiring assistive devices. We have put in place a subsidy scheme to subsidise their purchase of assistive devices. We also have a loan scheme in which they pay a 1% interest on reducing balance.
Submitted by : Albert Toh
Head, Communications Department