 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We cover various commission activities and any topics of interest to Nebraska librarians and library staff. We have commission staff that do some presentations and we have guest speakers come in sometimes. We do these sessions every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time. They are free and we do record them. We are not able to watch one of our live sessions. We have a whole list of all our recordings from the whole last year. We have been doing this available on our website. This morning we are going to learn more about the people who do the talking book and Braille service, how they do all that behind the scenes. I am just going to pass it on to you guys to introduce yourself and go right ahead. Hi, my name is Scott Schultz and I am the circulation and audio production coordinator for the Talking Book and Braille service. We have a few other folks with us here today too. I will let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves. Do I need to turn the mic? I am Bonnie Feynman and I am a volunteer narrator for the Talking Book service. I am Bill Ainslie the studio manager for our two Talking Book studios who tries to help organize the magazines and books and keep all the projects rolling. Excellent. We weren't sure a good place to start so we decided to go ahead and put together a little video for everyone to check out. We figured that might be a way to kind of introduce you to what it actually looks like down there since we don't have a video camera to go walk around down there. This video is also on YouTube. You can search for a recording in a Nebraska Talking Book and it will pop up. We just wanted to kind of show you the whole process of recording a book from book selection all the way through to books being duplicated and circulated to people. Here is a little video for you to check out. As you watch this, if you want to think of any questions you might have, we can dig deeper into any aspect of this that anyone finds interesting. Feel free to think of some questions here as we watch this. There is a public library for people who can't use print. The Nebraska Library Commission Talking Book and Braille service. Any Nebraskan who cannot see well enough to read regular print or cannot hold a book or turn its pages can get recordings of their favorite books and magazines for free by mail. The Talking Book and Braille service has over 60,000 recorded book titles available for checkout on a wide variety of subjects. Fiction, nonfiction, romances, westerns, mysteries, histories, birds, fish, cookbooks, and many more. Many of our recordings come from the Library of Congress. We also operate our own recording studios to add to our collection books and magazines of particular interest to Nebraskans. The books we select for recording are mostly by Nebraska authors, such as Roger Welch, Ted Cusier, and Tom Osborne, or books with subjects related to Nebraska or the Great Plains, such as Nebraska Moments and the Confined Roadside Guide to Nebraska. We also record 20 different magazine titles, including Nebraska Farmer, Nebraska Land, Nebraska History, Nebraska Life, Cappers, Grid, Big Red Report, Country, and Midwest Living. Our recordings are produced in two small studios operated within our facility. Typical recording sessions are 90 minutes or two hours. A narrator reads one copy of a book or magazine into a microphone in a small room. In another small room, a producer operates a computer with recording software, while following along with another copy of the text. There is a window between the two rooms, and the narrator and producer can talk to one another using microphones and small speakers or headphones. The words in the printed text are recorded exactly as they are written. If any mistakes are made, the recording is stopped and started again at the beginning of a good sentence or phrase. We strive for perfect accuracy. Before books and magazines go to the studio, they go through a process we call mapping. In order to make recording sessions run more smoothly and to make sure nothing is missed, marks are placed in the book or magazine to create an order for the recording. This is especially important in magazines, where an article might start on page 10, jump to page 20, and jump again to page 80. After recording the main text of an article, we may need to go back and record extra elements like photograph captions, tables, and sidebars. One of the hardest parts of recording books and magazines is pronunciation. Narrators have access to several dictionaries and pronunciation guides in their recording spaces. We have additional specialty pronunciation guides outside of our studio area, and we also attempt to look up some words by using online resources. We have compiled a list of online pronunciation resources that librarians can also use through the Nebraska Access website at NebraskaAccess.ne.gov slash pronunciation.asp. When recording is finished, books and magazines go through a process called post-production. At this stage, we can make many kinds of adjustments to the recordings to make them sound their best. Volume levels can be adjusted up and down, EQ can be added to improve voices, sibilance, loud S sounds, and plosives, loud P and B sounds can be reduced, extraneous breathing sounds can be removed, and recordings can be made slightly longer or shorter as needed. Books go through an additional stage of review in which a volunteer reviewer listens to a recording while following along a copy of the text to further ensure that the recording is accurate and noise-free. Any problems found at this point can be re-recorded before a book circulates. When recordings are finished, they are duplicated onto cassettes and then sorted into mail bags for delivery to our patrons. Magazines are sent out when finished similar to print magazine subscriptions, and books are shelved and either requested specifically by patrons or sent out because a patron has indicated interest in particular authors or subjects. We are in the middle of a transition to a new format. While we currently create materials for cassette, as we have since the 1970s, we are beginning to work in a new media format called the Digital Talking Book. These books will be circulated on cartridges, which are a specialized form of USB flash drive. This format allows for easy navigation between articles or chapters, but in order for that to work, our recordings will have to go through a new process called markup. In markup, navigation markers are added to the recordings, which can be used by our new players to navigate through books. Our new players and cartridges started arriving in August of 2009. Over the next several years, we will continue to receive more players, and eventually all of our patrons will have them. At the same time, more books in this new format will continue to arrive, and we will be creating Nebraska books and magazines to work with these players too. These books are very easy to use, and the sound quality is great. We're very excited about the future of Talking Books. A major... The PowerPoint just has that final slide. Yeah, let's go. Okay. All right. So that was our initial video. I guess let's see if we have any questions or anything yet. I'll get my control panel pulled up here. Let's see. I'll just go to questions here. Okay, let's see if we can go through. Okay. A few things to dig into the video a little further. First of all, we have more people than just myself working down there. We just tried to shoot the video really quickly, and so I just ran around to each of the stations to kind of get some basic footage. The volunteers do help us immensely. I do have some statistics with me to illustrate how much they help us. From October 1st of 2008 to September 30th of 2009, we had 49 different studio volunteers that contributed 2,300 volunteer hours. And for the Talking Book and Rail Service total, we had 118 volunteers who contributed 4,350 hours. So that's roughly what we get in terms of help from volunteers in a given year, which is immense, and it helps us tremendously. We can do what we do without them. And the studio's volunteers help us with narration. They do virtually all the narration. We have a few volunteers who help us with being producers who actually run the recording equipment, and we have a volunteer reviewer who listens back to the books as we saw in part of the video clip there. We also do have some volunteers over in the tape duplication area who do quality checking, which with that basically once we duplicate tapes, we'll have people listen to the beginnings and ends and fast forward kind of spot checking them because sometimes the duplication equipment won't work the way you want or a cassette tape might have a physical flaw as well. So we'll find those before we send those out to patrons. With Shifting the Collection, we have volunteers who help with that, which is just moving books around so that we can make room for new things as they come in. And really a variety of different clerical projects up in our reader's advisory area as well. And Bonnie Feynman, who's with us, has been a volunteer with us for quite a while. Let's check with Bonnie on a few questions just to kind of talk about the studio volunteer experience as narrators. Let's see, I have a few questions we could start with here and then if anyone else has any questions feel free to jump in as well. Bonnie, how long has it been since you've been volunteering as a volunteer? I think it's been roughly seven or eight years, Scott, and that would be once a week. Fantastic. What's your favorite thing about coming in to be a volunteer narrator? I love doing the narrating. I know that sounds like repetitious, but I love sitting there and stuff. It's like my own little radio show. It's kind of an ego trip. I'm 66 years old, so I've had a lot of jobs in my life. I've been a teacher and a legal secretary and a social worker. And this is my favorite job. I do have to say because it's the product of what we're doing. I love reading, I love books, and I love the idea of people who want to read and are physically kept from doing so. Being able to access reading material through this means and that's what I like. Oh, and the people I work with. Yeah, we try to have fun. They paid me to say that one. No kidding, kidding. You were saying, if you had a story earlier that you were talking about that might be fun to interject here too, Bonnie's also done some recording before she came to volunteer with us. That sounded really interesting in contrast to what you all just saw in our recording studios here. Technologies come a long way, and so Bonnie's had some experiences to contrast with that. I sort of took it from womb to tomb in terms of my, I guess the other way around. Anyway, from the very beginning to our modern system, I first began recording for a visually impaired Jesuit at Creighton University on a very, very basic primitive manner. I had a cassette player and I had little cassettes and he would tell me what he wanted me to record and he'd give me something to read from. And I would take it home to my kitchen table and put the cassette player on the table and start to read wonderful, exciting things like the minutes of the Jesuit Congress in Rome in the late 1980s, that sort of thing. And what was interesting about it, it was very, very primitive. And if a dog barked, I had to stop, back up, and tape over myself the same for traffic on the street outside because I was at 40th and coming in Omaha, which was rather busy. You got to thinking of the traffic as sort of ocean noise in the background. Anyway, that was very, very basic and primitive and then I went from there to, well, doing some reading for my husband when we were engaged. My husband happens to be visually impaired, it was just recording things that helped him with his job and with his professional and just daily living things like reading the bills and things like that. That's not exactly recording, but it is narrating in a way. Then I came to the library commission and when I first came here, we were still doing the recording on cassettes, I don't know all the technology, but we were just sort of beginning, you know. And then we started to have more software and they're using more computers and I don't understand all of that. I know it goes more smoothly now. And now that we're going with the digital, with that coming up, I think I have pretty well gone through various stages as well. Yeah, Bill, if you wanted to jump in there to you on the studios, we have computer technology, of course, like with every other area of life, I guess at this point, has definitely made some big changes to the way that we record things too and we switched, was it about six or seven years ago, Bill? Back in oh four, we finally got rid of those huge lumbering tape recorders. We used to have huge, they were probably three foot high reel-to-reel tape recorders and everything was done in reel-to-reel tape. The reels were cut to the length of the cassettes. That is 88 minutes, which means that there was about 1,650 feet of tape on one of those reels, which was fun when it all unraveled on your desk. Fortunately with the wave files that we're using now, we don't have that problem. Plus there's so many more things that you can do with wave files. When we were doing the reel-to-reel tapes, you were pretty much, what you had on the tape was get period. You couldn't really change anything. The volumes were set. The times were absolutely set. It was a real difficult thing to go back and fix something after the fact because you had to make sure that it fit absolutely down to the tenth of a second within the original time period for that recording. But now with the wave files, we can make the files a little bit longer, a little bit shorter, without changing the pitch of the narrators quite so nobody's going to sound like a chipmunk and they're not going to sound really deep as you stretch it out. And we can change the cadence a little bit. We can take out breaths, take out extraneous sounds. Most bonding never makes any of those extraneous sounds. It's just thinking no breathing in the loud. That's right, I tell people that our narrators go six hours without breathing. The walls in those rooms down there are blue because they don't breathe. And you can do many more things with the wave files than you could with the tape machines, plus having a lot more space on the desk. Computers are much smaller, of course, but there are around 30 people who volunteer in the studios. The volunteer narrators. We have two volunteer producers who run the computer while we're doing the recording. The producer's function is to follow along with another copy of the book or the magazine and if someone makes a mistake or if they breathe too heavily or if the chair squeaks or if the phone rings, we stop and we'll reset to the beginning of the sentence and go again and hopefully to the folks at home. It all sounds seamless. Most of the work for the, particularly for the books, with books we have one voice per book. The same narrator will start the book and finish the book go cover to cover. And with the books, many of the narrators will do quite a bit of advanced preparation. They'll check with the author on how to pronounce the names of the characters or places. They may call the drug store to find out what's the name of the drug or call the post office in the little town to mention in the book to find out how do you say the name of that little town. So there's, and they may spend 15 or 20 minutes per session looking in our dictionaries that we have in the studios or online. So there's quite a bit of preparation that goes on the part of the narrators that goes into working on the books. The magazines are pretty much red cold. We want to pump them out on a timely fashion. We'll still call the drug store, still call the publisher, but usually with a magazine, the narrator comes in and one narrator picks up where the previous narrator left off so they're reading the magazines cold. Now the producers or somebody else will go through ahead of time and go through the magazines as you were just seeing in that video because magazines may jump from page 20 to page 60 to page 80 and back again to page 20 for photo captions. So there's always instructions in those magazines as to what to read next. Then we have two volunteer producers in the studios and then there's three of us staffers doing the production work in the studios. Myself, you and Kate Kramer. Excellent. When Bonnie comes in we try to read the most complicated parts of magazines for you. Absolutely. Tables, charts. Well yeah, that leads into what's your lead story? We had some comments. Someone at the library commission when you were talking earlier, great volunteer to have at the session so much history of recording they like that. And thanks to you Bill on what really happens behind the scenes. The blue walls. The blue walls, exactly. It's all totally clean. The blue walls are because they're not a lot to read. That's fair. But when we do let out a breath you can hear it all the way down to the stake cap. Yeah, with, um, is there anything that you don't like about Mary? I did make some notes. You made some notes. I thought we might get to that question. No, it's not the process. It's the product sometimes that I don't care for. Tables and charts are very difficult to read. They become, they blur from one column to the next. And we have a magazine about hunting and I personally love Bambi so I have my moments of not wanting to call all those deer that eat all our baby lettuce. But what I don't like about those magazines are when they talk about the details, the technology of hunting deer and they're collecting deer urine and stuff like that to lure the deer. I think it should be a level playing field and I think they should all use bows and arrows. Hunters, not deer. And then the other thing I didn't care for as much was I had a very dull book. Luckily I don't remember the title or the author. And it's out that the plot was boring and it had a lot of Spanish in it and Spanish is not the language I'm best at. I have some French. It was just not a fun book. But I have had many more things that were fun. Do you prefer recording books or magazines or do you have a preference? I prefer books because of the continuity you keep going in a smoother fashion even if you do it in various sessions. You can't read a whole book in one session. As far as types of things I like to read, did you want that? I thought about that a lot because I knew that I was going to come in early today. And I like reading poetry. I like poetry very much and I think I'm good at reading poetry and we all tend to like doing what we think we're good at. Cookbooks came up last week and I thought she was. I am kind of good at reading recipes and there's a market for that. There are a lot of people that would like to cook if they had fun recipes and we have some great and frascate books I understand. And then I mentioned poetry. The thing I've enjoyed most, one of the things I've enjoyed most that we've done in the studio was a book by Ted Guzier that had a series that involved three different voices and it was like a little play within a play and I got to do the woman's voice and then Scott was doing one man's voice and Bill was doing another person's voice and then we went back and forth. That was a lot of fun. That was something we haven't done much of. That's another reason I like books though because you can do dialogue and it's a challenge to make it clear what person's speaking because you don't have the quotation marks in front of you when you're listening. That was an unusual book for us. It was a Ted Guzier book I believe and it goes against what we said earlier about having one narrator on each book which I think that's the only exception to that I can think of offhand. That was really fun. It was sort of like being in a great big movie tracks that you and Bill both set up and I did some recording on that and it was got a blizzard so we had various people recalling that it was a blizzard. Do you have a question? Do you have narrators that opt out of a book if it's not their style? That is a good question. We can't make anybody record anything so there are people who say I do not want to do this book. That's fair. And the narrators get some choice of their book beforehand. In fact, I have always chosen my book. I wouldn't have chosen that one and I know. But there are books we don't edit so there are books that have raw language or have some sexual content and we warn I don't say we like the narrator doesn't do it but the producer or somebody would tell the reader beforehand that this might be the reader, the client, the customer that this might be a book that has some explicit things and then they are warned so the narrator would not choose that book if it were something that offended that narrator. We've had an occasional narrator that would read the book but wanted to use a stage name rather than have their own name associated with the book and improve that. I can think of one of those in the last few years that was kind of interesting to the narrator. It was perfectly happy to finish the book but once they got about halfway in they really weren't enjoying the content. And very very few of our books are the kind that I referred to that people would find objectionable. There's an audience for everything and that's what I try and remember. This may not be the place to insert it but what I try to do to get me through things like the deer hunting or the columns somebody out there is listening to this because they want to know it. So I try to talk to that person even if it's not a subject that I myself enjoy. There's an aspect to this too that I think some librarians might be interested to find out about too since most of our correspondence with patrons is done through the mail and through telephone contact it's a little different than a typical library in that we have a recording software system or our catalog is through a program called READS from the Library of Congress and unlike most libraries we do have to keep a fairly explicit file of what interest to patron has both specific interest on particular titles or offers but also just general things like do they prefer westerns or romances, mysteries, etc. And because of that we can send books out that might be keyed into certain interests that they have and kind of related to books that may have an intent that might be offensive to people we can put some exclusions in their file if they don't want to hear strong language if they don't want incredibly long books because of course those recordings can end up being pretty epic. Moby Dick on cassette takes a very long time to listen to so we can do exclusions for length or language sexual content, violent content things like that. So again we don't censor anything, we record for words exactly what's on the page but in case the patrons might be quite allowed to say if someone lives in a nursing facility they may not want to be listening to a book with a lot of explicit language with their potential roommates around or something so it's a little different than reading a printed book sometimes in that aspect so we do have ways to help patrons out with that. Let's see a few more questions for Bonnie I guess too. What is your favorite project that you've recorded here or some favorite moments in the studio magazines? Wow I think I sort of covered that when I said I like doing poetry and novels where there's a lot of dialogue and a challenge to keep that going. I've never had a bad day here I think I did once, once I went home with my nose out of joint because I thought I knew how to pronounce a foreign word Bill thought he knew how to pronounce it and there was a draw and of course I was like the producer I'm only a volunteer there's no such thing as only a volunteer by the way it's like secretaries secretaries around companies volunteers around organizations pronunciation is incredibly comprehensive yes and well the one thing you asked what I enjoyed doing I learned something and I always enjoyed learning I learned that even though Midwesterners are supposed to have three voices of speech of anybody in the country which is why we have so many telemarketers in Nebraska that's true but I learned that I had more of an accent than I realized I had to learn not to say Washington but to say Washington so that's just a little exam did I answer the question? Part of the job of the producer is being speech coach just like Bonnie was saying of Washington instead of Washington or doing the clothes to wash your clothes those are the things we look for we do have Midwesternisms almost nobody here ever goes up on the roof of the house they always go up on the roof so we have an accent too just that our accent happens to be the one that is preferred in the broadcasting business that's right that's a good way of putting it of the producer is to be the speech coach to sometimes stop the narrator and say are you sure of that word look it up in the dictionary or if we just change the emphasis put this little pause here instead of after the word it changes the entire meaning of the sentence when you think about it how do you want to do that sentence? Looks like we have another question that came in too the question is how do you select the books that are read and I can address that a little bit director of the type of looking real service does the actual selection but I at least have some understanding of how he goes about doing that it's pretty typical compared to other types of collection development except that in our case our policy is focused on books that are either about Nebraska or the Great Plains or potentially authors that are from Nebraska or the Great Plains area so the primary focus is really on those particular subjects which makes sometimes finding out about books a little bit more complicated than it would be in a reading the New York Times bestseller list or something like that we do have some magazines that we record that have book reviews so we'll send those up today Nebraska History and Nebraska Life come to mind that they both do some nice book reviews that are involved enough that we can tell if it will be a book that's worth checking out recommendations come in from patrons sometimes we'll definitely give those a consideration borrowers and narrators that's right so we'll definitely take anything into consideration that people bring up we'll pass those all on today and we'll try to find a copy of the book to examine in some cases it can even be difficult to record a book but if the information seems really important and a great asset to the collection we'll go ahead and try to find a way to record it I know we have a few books there's one I can think of right now it's pending on being recorded that's extraordinarily complicated to make a book and it'll be interesting to get out once we manage to figure out how to do it so we record about 30 books a year in our studios but the concentration is on magazine to do something like 150 issues of magazines I might have the staffs on magazines here somewhere about 138 issues of magazines came out last year we have 89 different titles that we offer from the service 19 of those are actually recorded in our studios the others come from some other sources but that's a lot of material we do more magazines than the typical talking book library and when we do record those as Bill said earlier too we try to focus on timeliness which means that we will switch narrators as we do them but we want to try to get them in patients hands within a week or so so we'll tell pretty well could I insert something that's just sort of funny and fun I have been recommending a book in line to several friends that I email with because I finished it and the book's title is not relevant because I don't think we'll be recording it however in the process of recommending that book I mentioned several times have we ever heard of a good seller no, it's always a best seller and do people ever lowly recommend anything? no, we always highly recommend it and the funny is let's see Bonnie, is there anything that you think of as a challenge being a narrator or if someone tuning into this wants to try to become a volunteer narrator is there anything you'd recommend that you should work on in terms of skills or read the more you read the more you're going to be able to read out loud if you have read to children that's great experience I happen to have been a teacher that was good experience I think if you really in all seriousness, if you love to read you're going to be able to read out loud as long as you don't as long as you don't speak sloppily in the first place you know like if you slur all the time I don't want to do a demonstration but you know you have to be a person who does have clear addiction but they have an audition process so they're going to weed out anyone that's totally voiceless, clueless somebody else could talk about that how about the audition process as he runs all the auditions well in our auditions we have people read samples of about every type of material that we have there's some fiction there's a more or less a legalistic piece there's a table there's a description of how to build a wood duck nest box what the people will do with each one of those sections with the auditions we don't stop and fix things we want to see how the people sound but do they make too many mistakes do they do a good job describing the duck box how to assemble the duck box how do they do with all of the numbers and the names in the legalistic piece what do they do with the characters in the fiction that's what we're looking for in the auditions so we're looking there how does their voice sound in the legalistic and how many mistakes do they make those are two really big factors in the audition process in fact I think most of the people who take the auditions do not pass that's true especially lately it seems like maybe 25% make it through so it's been pretty low but that doesn't mean we don't want you to keep trying everybody so you get a lot of people that do want to yeah we probably do one or two auditions a month or something you do not have to have the golden throats to pass the auditions how well do you sound how well do you interpret the material accuracy and interpretation really critical sometimes folks will come to us with maybe broadcast backgrounds theater backgrounds as well as avid readers a lot of retired professors teachers instructors things like that it works out really well let's see for any other questions oh bonnie do you do any special preparations with books out at home before you come in? excuse me I have a frog in my throat and that happens in the studio so I have to throw my frog do you want to ask some other question and I'll come back in a second well one thing you could do too I wanted to mention the new players that we got as well and it does it happens if you're reading and you're reading for half an hour or an hour toward the end of the two hour session for example you'll be reading a lot less well than you were when you first came in what was the question any sort of preparations if I have a book I usually have the opportunity to take it home with me for at least a week or so beforehand and maybe not read it because I read better cold I really do I just happen to be a person who does in my own opinion I read better without a lot of rehearsal but I like to go through it see what it's about see if there are any stumbling blocks that I need to be prepared for any foreign phrases any anything that might embarrass me if I were picking it up off the shelf myself I read everything now so I mean myself personally I bought my sister a bracelet for Christmas and it says I read banned books and it has little copies of all the banned books around it and I am very anti-censorship when it comes to books and I think all librarians are Bonnie's been able to put up with this for quite a while for quite a long time because when you're doing one of the narration sessions from the standpoint of the narrator it's like giving a two hour speech with someone constantly interrupting you to tell you what you're doing wrong you have to be you have to have the patience of the job and to not get it's not personal you just have to realize everybody wants to do it properly and I've often figured that if we ever started to get lax and just let things go that the narrators would quit because they want it right also absolutely well one thing I wanted to mention to you not directly related to the studios but I guess related to the things that are coming out of the studios well the last time we did one of these presentations was about a year ago and we were talking about the upcoming new digital book talking about players which at the time still weren't out and since that time they actually have them out so I do have a website here where we can take a quick look at what these new books will look like here too let me go to the what's new section of the national library service site and I can show you some pictures of these we saw these at the very end of the video clip as well but let me zoom in on this picture here there we go they're fairly small, a little bit smaller than the cassette players that we've been using and they're roughly the same weight they're really nice and sturdy machines and in fact currently they started coming in August of 2009 which I think we mentioned in the video right now we have 441 of them out in the hands of Nebraska patrons all over the state we hope over the next year to two years we'll have them out to everyone currently we serve around 4100 Nebraskans the percentage is starting to climb up I think everyone will have them fairly soon we continue to get the shipments of them basically on a monthly basis the books are coming in as well I think we have, I didn't grab the exact numbers but there's around 1,500 different book titles in right now in contrast with the cassette collection there's around 60,000 titles so there's a ways to go on that but they're coming in pretty quickly they're coming in just as fast as I can get them on shelves at this point so can I see my cursor on the screen so you can answer okay cool let me use this as a little pointer here too to give you a quick overview of the machine the cartridge over here to the right of the player is basically like a flash drive the USB connectors over here on the right of it and it's flushed with the edge of the machine there's only one way to insert it in the machine which as you can see this one here there's a circle a little hole cut out on one side it's beveled so it only fits in one way they're very easy to push in and out they're quite easy to use the yellow buttons over here on the right side of the player are volume up volume down oh and coincidentally I have one of the machines with me you can't see the one here but I can at least demonstrate that the machine has a user guide built into it and it also talks to you as soon as you turn it on to tell you what the buttons do let me go ahead and turn this on here so what happens with this is if you push a button it will actually tell you what that button does so you can learn the machine rather intuitively just by literally banging on buttons until you get what you want so for instance if I hit the volume up button I get this volume up to increase the volume by one step press the volume up button there are 15 volume steps so it tells you really everything you want to know if I press the play button it will explain how you can use it to play and to stop play stop to start or stop playing a book use the large play stop button when the book is playing press the same button to stop the player when you press play again the book will continue playing where you last stopped when you have explored all the buttons it goes on and on you can also coincidentally there's a way to change the verbosity level of those two so that once you have learned the machine you'll have to listen to this so that play button coincidentally is the green button kind of in the center of the machine here there's rewind fast forward I might have said that the power button is this red button over here that has a little depression in the center and there's a sleep button here which people are really excited about we do have a lot of people who use the service who like to listen to a book as they go to sleep but you don't want to lose your paid and you know with these books since you don't have to flip the set sides as you did with the old books it could really keep on trucking and you potentially eight hours away from where you were the day before oh yes could I interject I haven't seen this before and it's kind of cool the sleep button is shaped like a little crescent moon and it's probably deliberate but it's fun too yeah you have options between I think 15 30 45 minutes and an hour that you can set to sleep for as well so if you're a light sleeper you can leave it on for an hour so yeah that would be really nice a headphone jack on the right side of the machine over here and the thing kind of I don't know if you can see this very well right next to it there's a little cap and if you pull that cap off that's a USB slot as well so that if you use our barred service which is a download service from Library of Congress patrons can sign up for that and once they sign up they can download books that can also be just placed onto a flash drive and inserted into that spot on the side or they can use a blank cartridge as well but those aren't very easy to come by yet. They're on the way though I would just like to say from looking at this and knowing what my husband as a user is presently using from the Library of Congress that's kind of redundant there but this will be so much easier for my husband to use and he is completely blind and has been from birth but he'll love this one, he'll really like it it should be coming soon to you so I did bring a book along I don't know if you can hear the audio quality of this very well over the connection here but I'll give it a shot we're just starting to work on figuring out this mapping there's a bunch of different standards that one has to follow to get these books to play properly the audio gets converted into a specialized format and then encrypted to meet the Library of Congress standards the JP amendment requires that the things we circulate are in a specialized format and for us in this case the specialized format itself is encryption but the format itself is fairly obscure at this point too the DTB format itself changes the audio into well just to bore you it's AAC is the file extension it's an AMR Wideband Plus audio which comes from the cell phone industry so these are basically like very very long cell phone ringtones so for instance if I pop this book in this is Heart of a Husker that we recorded in our studios here and I'm still working on getting this thing to navigate completely properly everything works except for the very beginning that will probably work by this afternoon so you just push it in and it'll Heart of a Husker Tom Osborn's Nebraska Legacy current position Chapter 4 and it jumped in on Chapter 4 because that's where I took it out last if I want to skip around there's previous buttons on this advanced player so let's go back to I'll hit play but I would Chapter 4 Chapter 3 Chapter 2 so you can skip around in chapters like that especially a fiction book that's that useful but certainly for people who read magazines or nonfiction books quick books as was brought up earlier this is going to be fantastic much much easier to navigate than having to fast forward and listen for beeps as we do on that especially if you're cooking while you're reading the recipe I mean really that would be a point you can quickly pause it there are two versions of the player as well the photo that's up on your screen right now that everyone's seeing is what's called the basic player or the standard player the advanced player where there's a line about halfway up kind of where the speaker is for the top here there's four more buttons on that player right in this line here otherwise the machine's identical and those are navigation related buttons so for people who do a lot of cooking for instance that's probably a preferable machine for them I have the advanced player up here with me because I'm testing that navigation so it just has these one two three four five extra buttons basically but otherwise it's identical these features that Scott is talking about are something that we could have never done with the tape machine so right now we have much more post-production as we call it than we used to have there's many things that go on in post-production Scott you might want to talk about that it's all part of the product that the folks get at home that's right yeah since all the audio is recorded digitally now we can do a lot more editing in the digital domain the video mentions a few basic things running compression to balance volume levels out say on magazines where you have multiple narrators we can go through to make sure that the volume levels don't jump between narrators and things like that we can take out some extraneous noises especially things like sibilants and plosives that can be kind of irritating on cassette we can totally remove those and you know just generally get the audio sounding really really clean before it gets copied into this new format and this is going to have potentially a lot of work on the production and post-production side in terms of putting in the navigation markers it really depends on the book if it's a basic fiction book it really may not be too bad and we may not need to put markers between chapters because really I can't think of any work of fiction I've skipped the chapter and felt like I read the book necessarily so for some things it won't be bad at all but for others cookbooks for example I know we do have a few cookbooks in the queue to work on and we can dig down all the way to the ingredient level on those it's just a matter of putting in the time to make that possible and then it's ready to go so now when we're done in the studio we're just barely halfway done with the whole project that's exactly right yeah it does it makes the project the studio time can potentially go even faster because we can tweak a lot of things after it's recorded instead of having to make sure it's exactly right as it's recorded it's kind of a funny tradeoff that way but yeah this potentially adds a lot more time on the back end to finish a production but it's really fun so let's see we have another question that's come through which is how do I get to become a TVBS user you can contact us which let me just bring up our contact info page quickly here so you can look at that oh it's in the powerpoint sorry yes and this is all completely free it's done by mail and we have a toll free number for agents who are outside of the Lincoln Lancaster County area here's our contact information in general let me speak to you a little bit on what it takes any resident of Nebraska who cannot see to read regular print or hold a book or turn its pages will qualify to use our service if you can't handle books or see to read even due to medication or while recovering from an accident or surgery that also applies you can temporarily use the service if you need to reading disabilities that result from organic dysfunction dyslexia in particular is what that's referring to that will be okay to work with the service as well and all the books and magazines and playback equipment are sent back and forth to patrons between us and patrons completely free of charge by mail it's all postage paid so there's really no cost at all we have the phone numbers that are up here we have the phone number where you can call in and talk to a reader's advisor who will get you set up with the service and find out what your preferences are in terms of what materials you would like get you signed up for magazines different book preferences we can take care of all that for patrons and I think I mentioned earlier right now we serve about 4100 Nebraska we'd love to serve another 4100 feel free to give us a call Scott I'm not sure if this is myself but do we have people I think we do who would go say to a nursing home where someone recently become a user to show them how to use the machine or do we tell somebody at the nursing home how to show them how does that work well with these new machines hopefully they're fairly straightforward I don't think they'll need too much because once they pop it out it really as long as you can find the on button you're good to go it'll explain why what I think I'm thinking of is we're an aging population now and so many people are becoming impaired late in life and I know several who would like a service like this but wouldn't have a clue as to how to begin to use a machine because they can't see the machine oh sure is that just something where you would tell a friend to go and show them or is there a that's a good question yeah the readers' advisors will set up some of that with initially when we get an application form which you can call the numbers on the screen as well I'll read those as well it's 402-471-4038 in Lincoln, Lancaster County and 800-742-7691 throughout the rest of the state once we get an application filled out there's a basic application that the patron or a friend or relative can help them fill out and send that back to us and at that point we'll give them a phone call and get them set up for the service and send out a machine the machine does have an instruction guide that comes with it but the readers' advisors can also call and help them get things set up the cassette machines are it can be kind of tricky because you have side selector switches to work with and speed switches that you might potentially need to change and they can't read the instructions and they can't read the instructions there's a cassette that comes preloaded in the cassette player if they just hit play hopefully that button ends up being the one button that will make sure they know where it is first once they get play on that it will tell them a little bit about the machine but if there's any questions beyond that definitely give us a call and we'll help them with anything we can well let's see, did we have any more questions coming in I think that covers most of the material we were going to look at today not yet something new I think we covered most of the material we wanted to so I'll wait a second here if any questions come through and otherwise thanks again for tuning in and again feel free to contact us if you have questions about anything if you want application forms promotional information if you want to volunteer if you have volunteer applications as well really anything you'd like more questions about the studios if you want to answer anything so thanks again to all of our volunteers they do the work, I tell people I just pay dude sit there and let them read to me that was horrible we're out to do it fantastic, yeah and one thing I love to get out there too is that the service is kind of a best kept secret a lot of people don't know about it so be sure to tell your friends and family about the service it's really the best way for us to get the word out about it is word of mouth we try to do other promotional things but that still seems to be the number one way to do it so be sure to let people know about the service so that they can let somebody else know about it and we can help out as many people as possible there's just a little comment about it we got a nice appreciation nice interaction all the speakers thank you very much thank you and thanks Bonnie again for coming in to speak to the volunteer experience for us as well and we'll see you soon you're welcome thank you very much like you said it is a best kept secret but it's good to the more people know about it the more people will be interested and want to get people sure there's somebody you might know who could use the service just be listening for Bonnie because in a few minutes she's going to be working on Nebraska Life magazine next to Nebraska Life there you go thank you very much if there's no other questions if you do have questions as you can see you can contact the Hagen-Bogen Braille Service Commission here with this information and that will wrap it up for today I hope you'll join us next week when we will have our monthly tech talk about the technology innovation librarian here at the library commission thank you very much bye bye