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The study of user's needs of DAISY books in Japan

Akehiko Tachibana
University of Shizuoka Junior College, Japan

1. The background and the purpose of my research

In Japan, the making and loaning of DAISY books was started in 1998 in the library for the blind. The number of loans has been increasing as years pass by.

In the 2003 fiscal year, 194,964 titles were lent out from the 83 libraries for the blind. It increased by about 20,000 titles from the previous year. And the number of loans of the DAISY books accounted for 32.6% of the whole number of audio books. In 2002, there were more loans of DAISY books in 20 libraries than cassette tape books. We can understand that this number supports the use of DAISY books.

Therefore, libraries must look at DAISY books more positively.

However, there are economic and physical limits in the making of these books. So it is necessary to meet the user demand.

The aim of the investigation was to collect data of user' needs for DAISY books and which genres there is a demand for.

2. Method

The investigation was conducted in January, 2005.

Candidates for the investigation were users who had registered with audio book network distribution services (Bibrionet) in the Japan Braille Library.

Candidates were sent a questionnaire in the post, asked to fill it out and return it to us.

The contents of the questionnaire included:

  1. The number of DAISY books used per month
  2. Preference of media(cassette tape books or DAISY books)
  3. Kind of DAISY player used
  4. The genre of DAISY books which the user prefers.
  5. The demand of DAISY players.

3. Results

The questionnaire was mailed to 592 people and a reply was obtained from 280 people. (response was 47%)

The largest group of users (109 users) was aged 50, followed by those aged 60(85 users). These two groups accounted for about 70 percent of all users. Although aged 40 was the next group to follow, the number of users was only 44 (15.7%), less than half the number of the largest group.

Generally, aged 50 and 60 were the main users of the library for the blind. This result of age distribution was reflected in my research, also.

The question of which genre of DAISY books the user prefers, showed the largest demand was for Japanese novels and essays(200 people, 22.9%)

The demand for foreign novels was 11.3%(99).

The combined total demand for Japanese novels and foreign novels was 34.2%, and dropped to 1/3 of the whole. A similar investigation in the previous year was conducted by the Japan Braille Library. The demand for Japanese novels was also largest at 36.7%.

The results from my study are mostly in agreement with the results from the previous year.

There was a demand of 15.1%(132) for books about how to use a personal computer.

This number was second largest, only to Japanese novels and essays.

Moreover the demand for books on medicine and pharmaceuticals accounted for 13.2%(116), and this number was the 3rd largest.

This demand(for medicine and pharmaceuticals) strongly reflects the employment situation of visually impaired people in Japan.

In addition, the large demand for books on how to use a personal computer means that it is a useful tool for visually impaired people which has many benefits. The demand for dictionaries was 12.7% .

We checked the number of audio book dictionaries in the Japan Braille Library as of March, 2005. There were 20 titles for cassette tape dictionaries, and 10 titles for DAISY dictionaries. The number of cassette tape and DAISY books has increased by a few as of January, 2006. (It is surmised that this number was loaded with the expectation for DAISY.)

Generally, audio book dictionaries are large in volume and take a long time to make. Moreover, it is the dictionary genre which is hard to make. However, there is a high user demand, and they are needed in libraries. The dictionaries are recorded by two or more people, as this reduces the amount of work time that is needed.

In addition, the demand for magazines was 12.2% (107). Cassette tape magazines have been viewed as inconvenient to move between articles. Therefore, many users were listening to all articles, even if the user was not interested in them. The cassette tape tended to become passive reading at this point. However it is easy to move between pages for DAISY. Magazine readers want active reading, not passive reading which is why DAISY magazines are more popular.

Conclusion

In order to have the number of DAISY books made increased, it is necessary to focus on novels specifically. However, there are many kinds of genres of novels - adventure stories, detective stories, best sellers and the latest stories. And user preferences are different. Therefore, a new investigation is required to grasp more concrete user preferences of Japanese novels.

It turns out that there is also a high demand for books on how to operate and use hardware and software for personal computers, and for medical and pharmaceutical information. It was also discovered that the user understands the function of DAISY and they would like more books on various genres, which can utilize these functions.