George Kerscher
Power Point Presentation
Libraries Serving Persons with Print Disabilities and DAISY Standards in the United States
By George Kerscher,
Secretary General, DAISY Consortium & Senior Officer, Accessible Technology, Recording For the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D)
Overview of Libraries providing services
- Library of Congress, National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS)
- Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D)
- Bookshare.org
NLS
- Federally funded
- Leisure reading materials
- Serves primarily older adults
- Operated in conjunction with State Libraries
NLS Services
- Provides free players
- Starting distribution of DAISY/NISO players in 2009
- Produces approximately 2,000 new titles a year
- Audio only with navigation
- Use professional voice talent, i.e. narrators.
- Have been digitally mastering for several years.
- Also converting many titles from analog tape
RFB&D
- privately funded as a charity
- Has received some federal funding in the past
- Is focused on educational materials
- Volunteer based, with more than 7,000 volunteer readers.
RFB&D Services
- Registers persons who are blind and print disabled
- Distributes DAISY with audio and full navigation, including page numbers
- Produces more than 7,000 new titles a year
- Have been producing DAISY for more than five years
- Have more than 40,000 titles in the collection
- Have converted some titles from analog cassette.
Bookshare.org
- Private charity
- Recently awarded a five year Federal grant, approximately 6.5 million US dollars per year.
- Started by blind people scanning books and turning them over to Bookshare.org
- Educational and leisure materials
- Bookshare offers more than 42,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools.
Bookshare.org Services
- Download only
- Provides DAISY, automatically converted to braille files, and text versions
- No audio in their books
- Accepts books produced from others through scanning.
Who is served
- All organizations use the US copyright exception for the legal distribution of materials
- RFB&D and Bookshare.org serve the "print disabled" population
- RFB&D and Bookshare.org uses the same criteria for registering members
- RFB&D has a focus on grades 1 through 12, approximately up to 18 years old
Who is Served
- Also 60% of books produced by RFB&D are for higher education, but this is a small portion of what is needed.
- Bookshare.org has focused on non-textbook materials, because of the scanning difficulties of textbooks.
- Both RFB&D and Bookshare.org have participated in work to obtain materials from publishers (NIMAS and new laws)
- Bookshare.org is now providing books from publisher files, NIMAS
- RFB&D is working towards this.
DRM
- NLS uses the DAISY Protected Digital Talking Book (PDTB) Version 2
- RFB&D uses PDTB Version 1
- Bookshare.org uses no encryption, but watermarks and fingerprints the materials distributed.
Looking Forward
- NLS will distributed an expected 500,000 players in the coming years.
- Both Bookshare.org and RFB&D will be obtaining more publisher files in the DAISY
- XML format (NIMAS) in the next years.
Questions and Answers