DAISY in Finland

Markku Reino, Celia Library

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Markku Reino and I’m the head of IT and development at Celia Library. Thank you for having me here.
My presentation is about DAISY in Finland. I’m first going to tell you information about our library and about our patrons, then a few words about our book production and our different lending services. Then we have a new project going on, DAISY online, which we call “Audio Stream.” In Finish it’s “Audio Verrda.” In conclusion, I’ll have a few words on how we are trying to build our version of the digital library. In our version, DAISY books are very central in almost everything.
Celia Library is quite old. It was founded in 1890 and it’s been a state-owned library since 1978. We have about 65 employees at the moment and we are the only library of this kind in Finland. We serve the whole country.
Celia Library both lends and produces talking books, Braille books and E-text books. We also produce quite a deal of textbooks, both for the university level and other school levels. We have about 15,500 patrons. Finland is quite a small country. There are about 5 million of us but it is estimated that there actually might be around 80,000 visually impaired persons in Finland, so we think that we still could gain some more customers.

We tested DAISY the first time in ’95. At that time, we got production programs on DTB from Sweden and did our first books. We continued these tests until 2003 and at that time the decision was made that DAISY will be the next talking book system in Finland. About 5 or 6 years ago we had quite a collection of the old analog tapes. We tried as fast as we could to digitalize them. Today almost everything is in digital format and all talking books are DAISY books. We have a little more than 23,000 DAISY books in our archives at the moment. We produce about 1,000 per year, so it’s growing quite fast.
We have our own digital studios and we also buy quite a lot of books from outside producers. We hope that in a few years we can use DAISY also as a base for E-text books and use DAISY XML text files as the master files and produce any other distribution copies from these files. For this, we are going to use as much as we can the DAISY Consortium’s tools.

As we are building our digital library, we need quite a lot of software systems. We use a Finish lending system called Pallas. It’s special in the way that it was designed for digital lending. In our case, you could say that it was designed for DAISY. It also has a catalog and web service called Celia Net. That’s a web service that our patrons can use. If you want to try it, just log www.celia.fi. You can log in as a guest. Most of the system is in Finish, Swedish and English.
When we digitalized our analog tapes, we bought quite large SAN archives, which we use in all of our services around DAISY delivery. We too use this on-demand lending system and our production department uses enterprise research packages to make the production as efficient as possible. Our textbooks are sold in an online store. We sell our textbooks to elementary schools and high schools. All university-level textbooks are free.
As I said, leisure books are lent on demand. It means that our patrons, when they come as our customers they have to sign an agreement where they promise that after they get the DAISY books and have listened to them, they dispose of the disks. They don’t have to return the disks back to the library. That saves a lot of money and also a lot of manual work.
Our patrons can also use these systems to borrow the books quite automatically. They could borrow them by themselves and the next day this on-demand system will burn the CD disks. In 2008 we burned about 800,000 disks. We have estimated that within a couple of years the amount will be 1 million. If you remember that we have about 15,000 patrons, that is a very high figure. It means that most of our patrons borrow about 60 or 70 books per year. That’s a good result for any library.
From this year on we have started a new service, online lending. Our patrons can now listen to streaming DAISY books online. This project is called “Audio Verrda” in Finnish (“Audio Stream” in English). The idea of this project is to use the internet as a distribution platform and to open all of our archives to our patrons. All 23,000 books are now to be streamed. We hope in this way to develop new distribution platforms and new production models.

Also, we want to integrate our IT systems to be as efficient as possible. Another very important aim is to replace this CD burning system with online lending. We don’t think that this will happen very fast. It will take years, but that’s the aim. Also, we are trying to develop new services besides just lending the books. We think actually there might be some services that are even better offered in the net, new kinds of services.
We think also that this idea of global library and interlibrary lending is very important. For that, we need these digital systems. It works between Sweden and Finland. We download books from TPB and also in Sweden there are quite a lot of Finnish speaking people and TPB get our books. Perhaps in a few years this could happen also between other Nordic countries.
The working principles of these services are multi-center distribution. We think that there are many channels in which we hope to distribute these DAISY books. Accessibility and design are always given when we design the services. And, naturally, we use DAISY Consortium specifications. This streaming DAISY online service is in fact a third project that we have. Back in 2000 and 2001 we did the first project. We built a working model but that was a bit too early. Last year we had another streaming project test. In that test, we used Netplex doc software. In this case, we have tried a Finnish software package but the idea is that we want to open this service to all players. We want it to be a player-independent service and we are going to make changes in that direction as soon as we can.

Here I have a picture of how this works if you are using a PC and a reading program. Our patron is at home with a PC using a browser and reading program. He or she first contacts our portal service. This portal service is a bunch of webpages. There is additional information about authors, about the book. We have book clubs, whatever our librarians want to put there. There is also a link which leads into Celianet, our net service. They use Celianet to search the books. After the patron finds what he wants to borrow, he requests for lending and the lending system gets the DAISY book files from the digital archives and puts them in the distribution server. The distribution server is just a server which holds a virtual bookshelf. Each patron has his or her own bookshelf, which can include 50 books. That should be enough. After the lending is done, our patron just closes the browser and starts the reading program. The reading program connects to the distribution server. Then he or she can start listening.
I have here some screenshots of the actual service. It is a working service. I tried it here in Japan and it works but I think this is a safe way to avoid demo effects. This is Celianet. Some of these texts are in English. Some of the texts are in Finnish. The software is so new that everything is not translated. Anyway, our users have a password. They log into the service. The next step is to search for books. There are many different kinds of searches: basic search, advanced search, recent title search and so on, even “I feel lucky.” In this example, our patron searches for Harry Potter. The language is Finnish and the materials are talking books, DAISY books. When the search is done, we have 11 hits. This one over here is “Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter ja kuoleman varjelukset.” It’s “Harry Potter” in Finnish.

Each patron has a profile. If he has the right to use this online service, the screens will look like this. He sees all of the books that can be streamed. If he hasn’t the right to use the online service, the screen just shows those books that can be borrowed as CDs and burned as CDs. Those persons who have the right to use these services can, of course, get the CDs if they want. There are no restrictions.
After that, our patron accepts the online loan and the system tells how many books he has loaned at that time. Also, the system goes to get the books from their archives and transfers them into the distribution server. There are a lot of other options in this server. I’m not going to mention them all but if our patron wants to see what books are in loan, he can make a list of them.
In this page, the list of online loans, our patrons can also remove the loans. The lending time is 30 days, as if it would be a normal book in a public library. After 30 days, the book will vanish from the virtual bookshelf. If he wants to renew the loan, it’s OK. He can also send a book back virtually in the library. If he has already borrowed 50 books and he wants to borrow more, he has to return something before he can borrow any more. We tried to make this look as much as possible like a normal kind of library service.

This is a picture of the reading program. It’s a Finnish program by the Finnish company PratSam. It’s a very simple user interface. You can use either the mouse or keyboard to navigate the DAISY structure. It has bookmarks. It remembers the last page that has been read. This is at the moment the only program that works with this service but, as I said, we want to open this service to other players, other programs, as fast as we can. We don’t want to have anything that is not a player-independent system. Now, as the DAISY online specifications are ready, I hope that we can do this perhaps within a year or so.

I also said that we want to have other DAISY services, not just allow our patrons to search the books and borrow them. We have what we call “channels.” These channels are the books that our library staff has selected into these channels. A channel could be a book club or book clubs, an information channel or a magazine channel. The library staff puts the books into these channels. If we are talking about a book club, our patron tells the library that he wants to join a book club. It might be, for example, a detective book club. Each month they get automatically let’s say 5 books in their virtual bookshelf. This is quite a good service. Patrons don’t have to do anything other than sign onto the channel and they get the books automatically if that’s what they want. They can use the search options and find more. This is very popular service where we use these book clubs and burn the CDs for our patrons.
This project started in June of 2008 and it will end in December of this year. This doesn’t mean that the service will end. We definitely hope to continue it. We have planned a lot of things for it.

We have three service models for this whole package. Service model one is for those persons who are comfortable using computers, using the internet, and want to borrow the books by themselves. There are a lot of those people. We have estimated that at the moment there are about 2,000 or 3,000 of our customers who use the internet. They use this service model one.
Service model two is for those people who use players and wants the librarians to pick the books. They are the channels, the book clubs. There are also a lot of those people. When we think of these lending services, we don’t want to exclude anybody. There are always persons who don’t want to use the internet or can’t use the internet. We allow those patrons a chance to, for example, phone into the library and ask about some books. The librarians will use this system and put the books into these virtual bookshelves. Naturally, every patron does need some kind of player or device to listen to DAISY books as they are digital books.
Also, we are building a portal service called Arena. That’s a joint service between many public libraries in Finland with Celia. The common theme between these libraries is that we all use the same lending system, almost. In our case, as I said, our lending system is almost totally rewritten for DAISY and for digital lending but as it is basically by the same company, we can offer our patrons the ability to search many different library catalogs. We think that this is something that could be useful in the future. Also, we are trying to put some Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 types of services into this portal (blogs, wikis, thinks like that) as long as they are accessible.

In conclusion, we are trying to build a digital library and DAISY is a very central part in all of these things. We don’t see DAISY just as a book but more or less as a way of storing information, information that we perhaps will not use today but which is useful in the future. Most of these systems that I briefly mentioned are built for this purpose.
We want to keep this distribution or lending multi-channel. It means that those who can’t use the net or these services will be served. We don’t want to exclude anybody. The net already is an important distribution channel but it will be more so in the coming years. Also, we know that our patrons will have many different kinds of players, software packages and devices which they use when they listen to DAISY books. We see our role more or less as a content provider for these. This is also one thing where we look at the DAISY Consortium. We want to get the information through these channels. Also, we have high hopes to direct these kinds of new services to Finnish hospitals or institutions. We think that there are many possibilities for using these ideas in that way. That is something that hasn’t been done yet.
Accessibility design for all is our aim, and this kind of international cooperation. We want to use the DAISY Consortium’s tools and we don’t want to invent the wheel twice. Thank you.