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Funding and governance of library and information services for visually impaired people: international case studies

Part2:Country studies

Denmark

Special projects

Pilot project for disabled persons with professional jobs.

A project which extends DBB's service for visually impaired people in employment by giving digital access to books containing human speech, electronic text and pictures in a highly functional search and find- and reading functionality.

Project Downlaan

DBB is a participant in an e-book project, Project Downlaan [http://www.downlaan.dk (laan is Danish for loan), along with a number of other libraries, mainly in large cities such as Kobnhavn, Ebsjerg and Aarhus, as well as DBC Media and with Gyldendal the publishers as observers. The main objective of Project Downlaan is to establish a national infrastructure for digital distribution from library to patron. Books are mainly in pdf but some are in XML. One of the aims of the project was to create an XML database, allowing different formats to be created on the fly.

According to the project's English webpage, which is not up to date, the pilot of the project encountered great difficulty in getting publishers to take part.

The e-books are protected by DRM (Adobe Content Server) and available for 30 day loans.