HathiTrust Expands Services for Print-Disabled Readers
HathiTrust at U-M, NFB to make 14M+ books accessible to blind and print-disabled users
June
29, 2016
ANN
ARBOR—More than 14 million digital books will soon be made available to blind
and print-disabled users, thanks to a new collaboration involving the National Federation of the Blind [1] and the HathiTrust Digital Library [2],
a digital repository hosted at the University of Michigan.
When
launched, the program will dramatically increase the availability of books for
users who are blind or print-disabled. According to the NFB, currently less
than 5 percent of all published works are estimated to be available to the
blind, most of which are popular titles.
NFB
President Mark Riccobono says the effort will be an important advancement that
will specifically benefit print-disabled students and scholars within the
academic community.
"While
most barriers that blind people face are artificial ones created by low
expectations, access to the printed word has historically been a great
challenge," he said. "This collaboration will, for the first time,
make millions of books available to blind readers across the nation, giving us
access to more books in a single repository than we have ever had. The
significance of this development cannot be overstated, and we are delighted to
work with HathiTrust to transform this dream into reality."
Founded
in 2008, HathiTrust is a digital preservation repository with more than 100
institutional academic and research partners that is housed at U-M. Their
online archive, a major portion of which was scanned by Google, currently
contains millions of digitized titles in different languages from libraries
around the world. Users can search not only by title, author or subject matter,
but also via page-by-page content within a book.
"Supporting
print-disabled users has been a focus of HathiTrust since the very beginning,
and we have long provided students at HathiTrust member schools with access to
our collection" said Mike Furlough, executive director of HathiTrust.
"The collaboration with NFB is an important turning point, because we are
now striving to help non-academic print-disabled users for the first time."
Over
the coming year, NFB and HathiTrust will collaborate to plan and implement
these services. User eligibility will be determined by criteria used by the
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and similar
services authorized under U.S. law.
According
to Furlough, HathiTrust currently provides a similar service
to qualified print-disabled students at its member schools [3]. The new program will expand this service to
allow similarly qualified users not affiliated with HathiTrust schools access
to full-text works in the HathiTrust collection.
NFB
and HathiTrust, like the federally operated National Library Service, will
lawfully and securely make books available to qualified people in the U.S. who
have print disabilities.
Source | https://www.hathitrust.org/
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Best
Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage
or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking
efforts for the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment