Internet Archive Offers One Million Works for the Blind and Print-Impaired

Mass digitization efforts with Open Library project offers new access

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 05/06/2010

• Copyright exception allows current works to be scanned and included
• "Old-fashioned book drive," say's IA's Brewster Kahle
• Mass digitization programs offer students and scholars better access

Today, the Internet Archive (IA) announced that one million books are being made available to blind, dyslexic, and print impaired people, as well as an international book donation campaign to further bolster its stores.

Some 340,000 works held by the IA have been converted to the DAISY talking book format, while the others are simply openly accessible editions available via the Open Library, an IA project that aims to create a web page for every book.

Companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon, have all made headlines recently vying for readers' attention and disposable income. But there are other ways to catch the attention of readers and libraries alike, as this move from the IA demonstrates.

Similarly, vision-impaired readers remain one strong constituency for the Google Book Search settlement, given that many more books would become accessible. The settlement is still pending before a judge.

New scale
Though the IA is synonymous in many circles with the public domain, this effort defines a broader purview. The project stems from an exception to the U.S. code concerning copyright that allows works to be copied for the purpose of making a work accessible.

The works will be made available to qualifying readers officially registered with the Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). Previously, some tens of thousands of works have been available through services like Bookshare and others.

But as IA founder Brewster Kahle told LJ, the project entails a new scale of offerings, more than doubling the number of works available in a single place.

It dovetails with IA's large-scale scanning efforts and the the Open Library's goal to make works and bibliographic data as openly available as possible. In addition, with the inclusion of popular and other in-copyright materials, the IA can offer print impaired users beyond the more limited selection of accessbile works currently available.

"We're taking the [IA's] mass digitization project, and reformatting it for the print disabled," Kahle said. But it also works the other way around: the more books added and converted to the DAISY format, the more raw material to work with in building a robust platform for the Open Library, both in terms of the works themselves as well as bibliographic data to work with.

(The accessible books portal on Open Libary also highlights the site's recent redesign, announced in March.)

International book donation campaign
Kahle said that his organization is soliciting books of all stripes from users who want to help the effort. "It's an old-fashioned book drive," he said, though he encouraged users to check openlibrary.org first to see if a book has been digitized before donating—"we want one of every book," he said. The IA will fund the digitization of the first 10,000 unique titles it recieves; Kahle estimated this would come out to approximately $300,000.

Mass donations are also a possibility, Kahle said, especially as many academic libraries are going through the process of deaccessioning as they move to increased reliance on digital access and shared remote storage.

National efforts fuel local accessibility
To serve print impaired students and faculty, a number of academic libraries have set up scan-on-demand digitization programs.

However, as mass digitization programs have increased many libraries' holdings, accessibility services at individual schools have broadened as well.

For example, at the University of Michigan—a Google partner library for scanning—texts have been made available to qualifying students for more than two years:

Once a student registers with [the UM Office of Services for Students with Disabilities (OSSD)], any time she checks out a book already digitized by Google, she will automatically receive an email with a URL. Once the student selects the link, she is asked to login. The system checks whether the student is registered with OSSD as part of this program, and whether she has checked out this particular book. If the student passes both of those tests, she will get access to the entire full-text of the book, whether it is in copyright or not, in an interface that is optimized for use with screenreaders.

Read more Newswire stories:

Critical Assets: Academic Libraries, a View from the Administration Building

Google Editions, Bookstore in the Cloud, Will Go Live By July

Internet Archive Offers One Million Works for the Blind and Print-Impaired

Congressional Draft Privacy Bill Released, To Mixed Reactions

Columns:
Washington, We Have a Problem | Peer to Peer Review

The Bursting of the Academic Library Bubble | From the Bell Tower

Wiley Online Library to debut in July; Maney journals being digitized; Credo adds Purdue Press titles; and more

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