 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, yes, we can take that proudly, that's what we'll say it. We broadcast, so we're an online show, broadcast online. The live show is done live on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's okay. We record the show every week and then do post it to our website later and I'll show you at the end of today's show, excuse me, where you can see all of those previous recordings and where today's recordings will go. Both the live show and the recorded sessions are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with any of your friends, neighbors, family, colleagues, anybody who might be of interest in any of our shows. Our focus is on libraries, of course, everything is library-related services provided to libraries, service things libraries, could be doing resources they could have access to, runs a whole gamut of all types of libraries, public, academic, school, special libraries, not really a lot of specifics there. Basically just libraries is our focus, so there could be some things that we do like for example today's show, could anybody you know may be interested in this one to actually go to your library to access these resources. We do make sure things on here here on Encompass Live, interviews, book reviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products, and we have guest speakers sometimes come in and sometimes we have commission staff and today we have one of our commission staffs. Scott Schultz here is our director of our Hawking Book and Braille service, which is across the hall from us here, all at the West Wing. It's another area, another office space to the West of us, and he's going to talk to us about new things coming in, talking books and how you can use the program, and there's a whole bunch of things, so I'll just hand it over to you to take it away. We've got the keyboard here, and the mouse, if that works for you, depending on what you're doing. Excellent, that looks great, thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, let's start with just a quick overview of what we do with the Hawking Book and Braille service, just in case anyone tuning in isn't aware, and then I'll talk about some recent changes that we've had and new things that we anticipate coming up relatively soon, and then I have a little PowerPoint presentation at the end that attempts to answer some questions that I've gotten from librarians over the last year, year and a half or so, where we'll occasionally get calls from universities, for example, we'll call in wondering what to do about getting textbooks for school, audio versions made quickly and that sort of thing, which we don't do in-house, but we do know where to send people, so I've kind of tried to make a PowerPoint that helps people to kind of get into the shoes of people who either have recently developed visual impairments such that they can't use regular print or have been blind for a very young age and make different types of resources, but is there a lot of different agencies that sort of work together collaboratively to sort of replicate the world of print in alternative formats? That's going to depend on what their situation is and why they have the reading issue could be physical, could be the eyesight, and there's lots of different things. Yeah, it really does vary, and so for just a general overview, so the Talking with the Rail Service has been part of the Library Commission since by 1932, we're part of a nationwide network of cooperating libraries that all sort of collaborate with the National Library Service, which is a division of the Library of Congress that in the early 1930s was sort of charged with coming up with alternative formats, initially just for blind people and then for blind adults, I should say as well. Over time they added blind children and then people with physical disabilities that made it so that they can't use regular print. For example, nothing able to hold a book or turn its pages. We use for people temporarily sometimes as well, like if someone has had a medical procedure and has to take a medication that causes board vision for a certain period of time, they can sign up and use the service during the period that they need it. So there are a lot of different things that bring people to us. Dyslexia as well is a qualifying factor, and we serve people all over the state of Nebraska. We mail books back and forth to the mail, and we also have some ways that you can access materials online and travel over some of those. Right now we serve about 3,500 people all over the state. So we provide what are called talking books, which I guess is obvious by the name of the service. Essentially they're audio books. They're in a specialized format that has enhanced navigational features. We also circulate Braille books and several other types of Braille for children like print Braille books that have the regular print and illustrations and then Braille overlay sheets so that children can learn Braille or at the same time as their parents can be learning it as well using books like that. The books circulate. For those who haven't seen it, I'm going to try to hold this camera right here. This is a digital talking book player, and the player, you send these out before you take any one who's using the service. They're very easy to use. The user guide is built into it, so either you plug the machine in or just find just the one power button, which I'll push here. So they do have batteries. Press any button to learn about its function. So from here, once the machine is on, you can just push buttons and the buttons will tell you what they do. So I'll just press the play button here for a moment. 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 machine will talk for a while there, so it's not a software for now. But you can go through the whole machine that way, and it'll train you to kind of use it just by pushing the buttons. And yeah, as Chris mentioned, it has battery. Actually, excellent battery life too compared to the receptors we used to have. Gosh, the battery charge on those, it's a very absolute best for 8 to 10 hours when they were brand new. These machines generally run somewhere around 29 to 30 hours on a battery. The battery seems to last, well, just from the ones that have been coming back probably in the neighborhood of six years or so. So that's how long we've had these issues. Yeah, we started circulating them in 2010. And 2011 is when they really had to be pushed. Like pretty much everyone started by then. Because they had to switch over from the sets. Yeah. So yeah, the batteries had lasted a very long time for batteries. They were in the neighborhood of 200 to 300 chargers. So yeah, they've been really great. Between the battery technology, having improved over time, and the fact that the machine doesn't have any moving parts, which helps a lot with battery life. Except where you have that motor, grinding away to keep those cassettes moving with this. The only thing that I guess would add to the charge that it's using is turning up the volume a lot, I guess. But other than that, it's pretty straightforward. The books that we circulate are on a specialized cartridge. It's just essentially a flash drive in a specialized shape. And they only fit in the machine one way. And you pop it in, and it will play an entire book. And then the navigation features that are added to these will allow you to move. Depending on the material and how it's been marked up between different sections, say a fiction book typically would be between parts and chapters. In a nonfiction book, it could go into some levels of depth beyond that. Or, say, a cookbook, it could go between major sections, like appetizers, breads, laundry, desserts, into individual recipes, and then all the way down to the ingredient model, things like that. So it's a very sophisticated form of navigation. And if you're in a book club, you can also hit the mark button and add bookmarks, which is kind of fun. So yeah, it's very easy to change. You just pop it in, and all this is all extra. Hot off of the audio processor this morning. The New Odyssey. The Story of the 21st Century Refugee Crisis. By Patrick Kingsley. DB87655. Copyright 2017. By the authority of Congress Annotation. Contents. Prologue. Prologue. 15 April 2015. Yeah, so you can navigate through fairly quickly that way too. So I'm sure that's, in your own case, you haven't seen one. So that's mostly what we circulate to people. The books go back and forth through the mail as free-matter for the wine. So there's no cost to patrons to use the service at all. For the return postage or anything. Absolutely, yeah, it's totally free. And also people who are comfortable downloading books, we do have a website that NLS has created called Bar. That stands for Braille and audio reading download. People can sign up to get a login and password for Barred and then you can download books either to a blank cartridge or you can use a regular flash drive. There's a little USB drive inside of the machine. You can use those on as well. So that's another way of using the service. Do we have, can we show that through the, how we access to it? I can show that, yeah. Yeah, if you're on our website, you can just go over to this bottom item in the menu on the left is the fucking books and Braille section. And then you can go over to the main page here. This has just a good overview of all what we have. And I'll talk about our mobile here in a moment. New titles that come in show up in this right column that we have over here. You can get 2D application forms to sign up to use the service from here. I believe there is no link directly to Barred from here. You do need a password and login to use Barred. The whole service is kind of a, I guess you could say a closed system and it has to do with copyright protection. We're able to make recordings and circulate recordings of pretty much anything that's published in the United States outside of dramatic works like plays. But any typical books or magazines, fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter. You can get specialized versions of them and they have to circulate to people just within the system of the service to protect copyright. So each state has their own topic of Braille service generally that is covered there. Is it that digital download right above the picture? Is that the link to Barred or is that? Yes, I believe that would be. This will take you right to Barred. I'm checking to make sure it looks like correctly. Barred is a little bit difficult to use for some people and that's actually one of the news items that happened. There's a new version of Barred. It takes a while to set up, so I didn't want to put it on this computer, but it's called Barred Mobile. Once you've downloaded that, it mimics the way that you can download books to a mobile device. We have an ILS app and a, it's still there, and a droid app that people can use to access things. So it's similar to those. There we go. Let's see, we'll see too. Oh, that didn't work well. That's great. Let's try it down here. Looks like that's okay. There we go. Yeah, so the main page of Barred, the simplest way to use this is you can just search the question by entering either a title or author in there with all kinds of things from there. You can browse by author's last name with letters to this file menu, get over titles here, and then we have a number of subject settings that you can access directly from here. What a lot of people like to do, a lot of people that use Barred end up downloading quite a lot of materials, so they keep up with new materials that are added pretty frequently. So one of the things that people will do is just go to new materials and read through those really quickly. Yeah, so this will put in things that have been added in the last week or so, typically show up on here. This is the N51 in the last week here, so for audio materials, new AARP people, can read through and look at science fiction, as well as science fiction, and then pass the magazines here. You should get two books as well, or maybe I just want to move that into this section. But anyway, you can get to a number of materials that you can access, but anyway, you can get to a number of materials very quickly that way. There's also a drop-down menu for OEI for those issues. You can go directly to magazines so if you need to access a back issue, you can go there as well. So it's fairly simple. On the mobile side of things, it is a little bit easier once you have a login and password for your mobile device. You don't have to continue to enter your login and password. It will remember those, and you can put things in the wish list and the other thing for talking book services is that if you have a mobile device like a droid phone or an iPhone, you can actually listen to the materials directly on the device. Historically, because of that specialized format issue, there wasn't probably a way to do that. So you had to have a special player from us to listen to the books at all. Now with the mobile apps, you can actually listen to them. We're spending with headphones, of course, because the speakers and mobile devices are... Not that great, yeah. It's a very similar thing. Absolutely. Yeah, it's very similar to using over a million dimensions. So that's one of the new things I was going to mention for two. And you had a link to that on the... Yeah, I think barred mobile manager is probably one of the key features. The main feature I think through was... Yeah, that is... Exactly. So you can download barred mobile to use on your computer, basically mimics the way that the Android app works. Almost exactly. So you go to mobile play, you can download this, but you actually use it on a PC. You don't have to use it on a mobile device necessarily. So it was actually designed by the husband of a patron in California who just felt like barred was a little bit too complicated for a lot of users. And so having seen the mobile device downloading the system and how much smoother it is, using barred in the traditional way, download the book, and then you have to basically create a zip file, you have to unzip, and that has to be kept just as it is and copied over to the part which you play. And whereas with this, you just download it, and you have to sort of file management. It kind of takes care of all that stuff for you. So that's been a really nice help. As far as other new things coming up, I guess I should mention it's been a little while since I've been up in Compass 5. I did become the director officially in January this year, so that was my game. Your point is director retired, Dave? Yes. Yeah, Dave if you're out there. And there was a really cool happening in Dyslexia in Nebraska this year. There was a bill of LB645, which was passed in this year's state legislative session, and essentially that adds a definition of Dyslexia as a statute related to education. Basically the intent of it was to lay a foundation for what to do in terms of early identification and intervention for Dyslexic students. The definition that they added defines Dyslexia as having a physical origin in the brain, which is important for talking about in brain services, because for us to be able to serve people with Dyslexia some of the legal use involves this notion of organic dysfunction, a physical impact of some sort that can be traced to a physical manifestation or organic dysfunction. That does tell nicely the definition of the Dyslexia statute, and so over time what we're hoping is that as we work with other organizations like the Dyslexia Association, we'll hopefully be able to nurture some relationships that bring more Dyslexia students and the notes as well to the service, because we're here to help them and we're happy to serve many more people among the Dyslexia population. So we're looking forward to maybe being able to help especially students initially with their reading needs and get books out there too. We have a new O-PAC which is kind of cool too, I can't answer that unfortunately, because you have to have a special blogging thing that only works on stickers. But we can sign patrons up so that they can get access to an O-PAC that works, or a true O-PAC that interacts directly with our circulation system. In the past, our computer team here at the commission made a really cool O-PAC for us that sort of looks at data and allows people to email us a list of things that they're interested in, whereas this new system will allow them to actually put requests directly into patron files by a patron. It takes out those and need for a middle person to turn data entry then I guess. Exactly, that can be really helpful especially for borrowers who borrow a lot. A lot of times we find that friends and family members of patrons will use the O-PAC and the patron might have said, I'd like to have all the John Gerson books but they don't use computers frequently so they'll have a friend or a child or someone go ahead and take care of that for them. Another interesting thing from the last year or so is unified English Braille has become the new standard for Braille across the United States. Essentially, it's pretty similar to grade 2 English Braille which has been the standard since about 1933 but it updates it to essentially you're trying to unify some international differences between Braille code and then also dealing with simpler representation of some modern advancements since it hasn't been updated since 1933. They didn't have a lot, well it's an update but I guess it's not comprehensively so but it deals with things like simpler representation of web URLs and things like that which nowadays come up a lot in print and they were kind of clunky in Braille so it makes those things a little bit smoother. Then the last as they produce Braille starting last January they are producing things entirely in UPD so I mean one in three patients they're having a great difficulty with it it's slightly different so is it a big change for them? Not terribly so. There's a teeny bit of a learning curve depending on what you're supposed to do in XAWIRED magazine, you're going to learn about the URL differences really quickly other things works with fiction you probably end up with a tremendous amount of difference right off the map but there's simpler opportunity to help the differences. This year was the official end of the cassette era as of June and a lot of us asked us to send back some of the stickers. You have the blue boxes now that was the green boxes everything with the shells he's be all full of green and now they're all blue. That's right. Yeah those green boxes and all those 1970s looking at age, they went back to be recycled in June. We still have quite a few here just over 600 machines here that we sent to Recycloid we still have a few patience to use anytime you make a change to any technology there are some people that just really like the technology they've been using and continue to hold on to it and that's fine. So if people do prefer that they're still supporting it in some way but eventually they're going to have to lose. Yeah basically, yeah. Most of the books are gone and they've all been converted to the digital format similar to that way. We do have some Nebraska titles but yeah they can set the parts to repair the machines that are gone So once they're gone, once they break down that's it. And of course we have record players record set players and I still everyone's fine with getting one of those back to them so they're still out there It's kind of interesting Commercial audiobooks have been anything over the last couple of years Generally speaking the materials that we get from the National Library Service are recorded by contractors that NLS works with to do the recordings. They usually have three or four contractors at a time We produce about 2,000 books a year for the programs all over the country In the last two years they've worked out some deals with several commercial audiobook publishers who are now giving their audio files to the NLS contractors so rather than having to record them they just have to do a little navigation mark up to convert the audio file into the digital document format and send that to us So what that's meant is that we get an additional 1,000 books per year So going from 2,000 to 3,000 a year has been a tremendous benefit I think too, I think the cartridges they take up less space than the old set boxes and everything so we can fit more on our shelves Absolutely, yeah, we can fit more on the shelves and for patrons with cassettes They're not having that anymore, I was like, wow, where are you going to put all this? That's interesting I know you were doing some sort of shit We were just talking about it recently Yeah, but it did mess up our shifting plans But that's okay That's a good reason to have the shift Absolutely, so that's been really helpful In the studios, let's see, we've been playing around with some deep-repping software which sounds very scary, but it's kind of a fun thing In our recording studios here in England we record a number of magazines for around a couple dozen right now 22, by the way and on books either about Nebraska and the Great Plains or Nebraska Occurs that sort of thing We have a couple dozen volunteers who come into the recording studios for 90-minute or two-hour sessions and work with our staff on making those recordings A lot of the volunteers but not professional narrators, of course it's a volunteer position They tend to be retired professors or teachers, librarians that sort of thing They're excellent readers with the most perfect voices in the world So for example, breathing sounds can be distracting sometimes Someone might be an excellent reader and we're related to work with them but we do get some sort of sound So we've been playing with this new software that can remove or proportionally reduce the sounds of breathing It's great, how technology comes up with these things We've had some pretty good luck working with it on trying to find some good general settings and it just helps the recording sound better. So it may be one of those things that we just sort of noticed it because we're working so careful with post-production to make the recording sound as good as possible but it'll definitely help to really keep that going I want to mention for any of you who go to uni, we're going to the LISLA conference next week There will be a TBBS-related presentation that our viewers might enjoy and this week we'll be doing It's called non-visual desktop access NBDA for all What that has to do with is there's a free screen reader for Windows called NBDA and it's fairly easy to use You don't need all the tech support stuff with JAWS or the complexity of it So the presentation is really neat I was looking at some of the info for it yesterday and it'll show people how easy this is to use and train people to use NBDA and also how to set up a visual impairment computer station in your library on a very, very tight budget She has some price ranges in like $33 to $100 range to make a really nice comprehensive setup I know because a lot of that equipment can be pricey We did it as part of our previous VTEP we did some ADA specific workstations and that was a big, because we had grant money we were able to get that into some of the libraries they would never have been able to do it themselves JAWS is in and of itself very, very expensive What was in there VTEP the Dragon? So yeah, a lot of those things individually are very expensive If you find that those aren't working for you or they're updating it and it's becoming a chore, this presentation will give you some other options to consider that are really inexpensive too but also work very, very well So that will be on Thursday at the conference C3-4 if anyone is interested so I didn't want to mention that Just to mention a few things that are coming up in the future The first of them is duplication on demand It's starting to be tested We're ready to join the second wave, it will probably be about pilot testers for this What this entails is as things are now, as Chris mentioned before we have shelf after shelf talking books and so as things are now in the morning we run nail parts that tell us what books people need books that were returned to us yesterday were checked in and that causes more books to be ready for those people the next day and so we'll go through in the morning and pull the books that people need and get those into mail bags in a few days from now Over time, however they're testing this concept of duplication on demand and what that will be is that rather than printing mail cards and pulling books we'll print mail cards to tell us what books to make copies of So they'll send us a special duplication a station where we can duplicate I believe it's 15 books at a time and it's sort of an automated process where it will print out the mail card start to copy that person's cartridge and then it will also produce a nanotest that will tell the patient what's on that cartridge So it's still kind of in the test phase NLS will be providing libraries that do this test with the duplication and printing equipment to try it and we're definitely looking forward to giving it a try Seeming it works well and the first phase I've heard pretty positive things so far I think there's eight libraries testing right now Are these the cartridges? Are those re-recordable? They are If you think this particular book that's on this one you ought to see if that need to be used for some other title or... Yeah, they can be used Basically it's similar to a typical flash drive So it depends on the I guess the quality of the flash memory that they're using It's probably somewhere in the neighborhood 500 to 5000 Pretty good window there but even 500 duplications is an option So they'll last quite a few years typically So eventually we'll probably shift for making those sorts of custom cartridges The other advantage of that is that we can put multiple books on a cartridge for patients who are interested in that So rather than just having one book per cartridge if you press and hold the play soft button on the machine it will take you into what's called the bookshelf And in the bookshelf area you can go back and forth and choose between basically how many materials fit on the cartridge memory line So you could have just two books or maybe 50 magazines or whatever and you could have a place on the one part for each piece of that way So hopefully we'll start playing with that early next year and if that goes well it'll have an effect on that so we'll be probably dedicating an area just to materials to use for duplication on hand and still portable physical copies during some sort of transitional period too We're also making some changes to our website It's nothing that anyone will really see directly but in the talk we're looking for a section of the website Amanda our reader's advisor who is doing this presentation next week is working on some sort of back-end changes that will make that part of the website work even faster and work immediately with screen readers So that'll kind of speed things up a little bit The whole site of course is ADA compliant but there are some little tweaks you can do to make it quicker Yeah, make it work easier Kind of get to the information that you're really working for more quickly So we're implementing those I think some of those are already out from the rest of them which should be up by the conference So those will be very quick As far as future things that we're hearing about from NLS the next NLS conference is in June of next year in Nashville By any of the conferences they kind of show all the regional libraries, the new technology that's coming out and let us see some hands-on demonstrations and progress reports on what's happening The big two that we're hearing about right now are they're looking at a the new generation of this player We've been distributing this digital talkable player since about 2010 and the new one the main difference that we're hearing about is that we're trying to add some sort of wireless connectivity to the machine We're not sure if that'll happen through I mean it could happen through cellular connectivity or maybe through Wi-Fi or some combination there Not sure how that's going to go yet but they're working on creating something with that and actually we are, there's a very, very, very early pilot probably not even technically at the Alpha stage yet called MOCA which I can't even remember what that acronym stands for but the MOCA test is due to starting a week or two That's going to be some sort of custom device that we're not even sure what it looks like they're going to send it to us probably a next week or two and it will allow us to try some sort of wireless network that goes through the BARB website It's sort of self-destructs after I get two gigabytes of memory being used because it's using some sort of cellular data that can allocate to us All the test ones So once the test is done then I guess we send that device back to them but at this stage they're just kind of just testing the waters a little bit I guess just to see what we like about the general concept and what sort of problems we might encounter as they get into the design phase of actually making a machine that can take some of those things into consideration to make it better Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people there's so many things coming on your cell phones now and being available wirelessly and the audio books being able to download directly I'm sure they've got people asking Oh yeah, absolutely Where's this? Why can't we do it with this? We can do it with this We can do this with overdrive So over time Interesting, I get the impression that the system can work kind of similar to say an Amazon Kindle where if you've been thought of readers advisors as being in the position of Amazon where the patrons can call, talk to them, interact with them email them help with reading preferences and get those sorts of things narrowed down and then you can sort of push and pull books to run wirelessly where that's possible So over time it's looking pretty likely that the concept of having finished books on the shelves ready to be pulled will probably transition looking maybe five years out towards some sort of a hybrid process where a lot of material could be delivered wirelessly for folks who can't for whatever reason have access to using the wireless mechanism we can do the duplication of the names if the phone's for them and maybe some books on the shelves would probably be more modest So those are things that are always down the road probably before all of this would be an incentive things to think about that are coming up So yeah, that's kind of where we're at with updates. So this next part is a PowerPoint thing so apologies if you don't want to watch a PowerPoint they're not my invitation slides at least so that's fine let's see And if you go up to slideshow you can do on the PowerPoint in the center Oh well, oh here we go Yeah, and then from the beginning always the left Perfect So this presentation like I said I've kind of put together just in response to a set of questions that people have asked over the last year and a half or so just trying to give people some sort of sense of getting in the shoes of a potential patron the B of ours but there are people that I think come into public libraries all over the state academic libraries as well school libraries and it would be useful to kind of give people an overview of what we do and how we can help to support people in your area as well so we'll start with a couple quick statistics it's difficult to get exact numbers on the number of blind people per state I've pulled some numbers these are a combination of information from the National Federation for the wine and I'm kind of looking at some American community survey results that have a little bit of stuff the final sense is that it doesn't really split things out with wine this percent most of the American community survey statistics you have a little bit so roughly speaking there's probably somewhere just try 34,000 Brazilians who have visual impairments and we serve about 3,500 so we're always kind of looking at serving somewhere in the 10% range of people who might be able to use this service I've pulled in some numbers too just to sort of see how we compare and we're actually looking at some of the better statistically so that's good a lot of people are losing their vision as part of the aging process and it may not consider themselves blind for example too so gathering things statistically can be kind of a challenge because they're still exactly like for instance they may not be able to be regular print well anymore but they may still be doing other things with vision so they're not doing other things in terms of blindness so that's a thing to consider that you may have people that come into the library who you may have seen for years and years that read lots of things and they kind of switch to the large print section and then you start to not see them come in as often and those are people who we'd be that's good to reach out for too for this that definitely helps us a lot and looking at statistics for Braille readership too it's been a period of decades where Braille readership has declined so much so the percentage of children who are learning Braille in school right now seems to be around 10% it's mostly due to mainstream schools over time that of course is problematic because when you look at statistics that is for people in point that people who are blind who have jobs 80% of them read and write Braille clinically because it really is a form of on shall we say complete literacy that's different than audio with the audio materials you're able to keep up with print but as far as making writing it doesn't give you that happy equation so reading and writing Braille clinically is really important for that the National Federation for the wine of course is constant and ongoing campaign to encourage people to read Braille so that's why I grabbed the statistics about that from them and our stats too we primarily do circulate audio materials we have a lot of Braille in-house for children and young adults and then we contract with Idaho sorry, Utah to send us a built Braille we have a few dozen people who use that you can also download Braille and put that on a refreshable Braille display which is a computer device that basically sells a sense of Braille at a time or a line of Braille at a time and you can read that into the next line and so forth we do have a few people who again people who tend to be working, employed ordinarily younger folks relative to the average HR patrons do a lot of Braille now so that's another thing to consider over time but the history of Braille is like looking at a very complex matrix of things like imagine if you can having the what they call the War of the Dots that was happening in the teens and twenties in the United States of these different things ultimately the War of the Dots boiled down to three of these the New York Point system American Braille and English Braille ultimately English Braille won the battle of the Dots back then and became kind of a standard but if you were blind at the time going to school you might have had to learn multiple systems to read the same things sort of like learning a foreign language except the words being represented are still in one language so you're learning several different codes essentially for the same language so it's a complicated thing when you think about it and Braille continues to be updated as I mentioned earlier Unifind English Braille has now come into official use other things to consider too is there's a music code for musical notation which is fairly sophisticated just to represent simple musical activities there's a lot happening in the given musical composition say if you're doing a piano part you might have a bass and a treble line chords being played at the same time some of those being held over while other things are being played and the combination of regatta lines all those things have to be represented somehow in Braille which turns a measure into a page of Braille sometimes depending on how sophisticated that particular measure is the Nemeth code is also still to go to for mathematics that's kind of a whole separate system to learn it's also worth considering that there are several grades of Braille students and people learning grade 1 Braille are essentially learning letter by letter but adult Braille or grade 2 Braille as it's known is contracted to safe space that does make learning a little bit more difficult though because I have to memorize all these contractions as you're reading as well it's kind of like stenography I guess in a sense shorten up so it gets very difficult historically these refreshable Braille displays for downloading Braille they work wonderfully but they're very expensive they're typically floating between $3,500 up to $15,000 I was wondering what that means they seem very high tech that's simple news too that I didn't mention earlier again sometime in that 5 year in the future range NLS is doing a test right now at Curtin's library with a cheaper new model of a braille display that might be economical enough that they can actually provide them to libraries so we can circulate them to patrons so we're really looking forward to that that will help immensely with that kind of situ arrangement in terms of audio formats we started on vinyl records back in the 30's and then in transition to the 70's maybe in 2010 to the digital talking book and there are also different types of text-to-speech things that are out there too I wanted to go over what a few of those things are this is something, you know, if you're watching this I don't think you need to memorize all these different organizations but I just wanted to make people aware that when a patron maybe somewhere else in the state comes to a public library and is looking for some help you can direct people to us and we can help them to find different organizations but this is kind of the sampling of the really cool matrix of different organizations that kind of all collaborate to provide reading materials to people who can't use regular print we are essentially the regional library in Nebraska for the Library of Congress National Library Service we've already shown you today is the types of materials we provide we essentially are trying to provide materials in terms of what a public library would have and around around 70,000 titles available through us the average public library has around 90,000 titles some fast facts from mcds.ed.gov so we're somewhere in the neighborhood of what it says the public library would have for offerings with reading that tends to focus on pleasure reading fiction and nonfiction nonfiction tends to not be academic in nature though biographies and histories and things like that other services that are out there there's Bookshare which is run by a company called Benetech they have a big grant from the department Ed and they have a really giant number of books I created that they have and so somewhere in the neighborhood 200,000 their books however are produced through text-to-speak and so aesthetically they don't sound as good text-to-speech has come a long way in the last few decades but you can still tell you're listening to a robot voice even if it sounds a little bit human and it used to and you can only have mispronunciation so it's really good though if you just need the material it's a good go-to to get the material quickly and be able to process it Newsline is a service that we actually try to sign people up for right away if we sign up for talking books through us Newsline focuses on newspapers and newspapers are one of those things that we really can't keep up with because with the things that we record and the thought that Congress has recorded they tend to be books and magazines but if you're recording a book if you're recording a magazine you typically have a month or two between issues to be recorded newspapers that's a daily so it's virtually impossible to keep up with them Newsline is accessible either online or through telephone and it's another text-to-speech thing where they've worked with different newspapers to get a special kind of text file that can be quickly used with a text-to-speech conversion to make versions that can be listened to either over the phone or on the internet and they do make a digital talking book version of it too that can be downloaded and played on a cartridge if people are preferable to listen to it on a machine so that's another service that we really try to sign people up for right away so that they have that kind of they complete sort of print literacy that they would expect to have when they were using regular print they can read their newspapers and also keep up with magazines and books all at the same time the radio talking book is kind of related to that too the radio talking book is based out of Omaha and they have special radio devices that only pick up this one station that they broadcast on and they can also be listened to online they too keep up with newspapers and I guess you could say a more state-regional supplement to the newsletter they do the World Carol and the Journal of Spire every day and then they do some other newspapers from around the state like Columbus, Colorado North Fort North Platte places like that where they once a week they cover some selections from these different regional newspapers to try to keep up with things like that too and they also do some books as well like I know folks is kind of a serialized thing for a while where like they're one of Brooklyn, Nebraska we make those available through a cartridge for people who are using the radio talking book service sometimes they like to listen to them in the serial thing just kind of fun, you know it's like you and a bunch of other people around the state are listening to them at the same time so we'll go through and do it in that way in an hour or two a week Christian Record Services is a place that's based here in Lincoln but it's a national service I think they folks have said that they use materials primarily but they do a few magazines that are more inter-denominational I put them on their physical review that they're right here in Nebraska right here in Lincoln in fact and they too use the digital talking book format so when we made the change to this they made the change to you so it's kind of the standard for materials for disabilities at this point and commercial audiobooks are still very much part of the whole pack if you have a patron who's using talking books we certainly encourage them to use commercial books anything that works for them and eBooks can be part of that too if people are downloading things to Kindles or Nooks that have a text-to-speech capability that's definitely part of the overall process however as this fellows backpack shows you using all these different devices with different specialized formats that's a lot of different things to keep track of so this is one of the things that I wanted people out there just to kind of think about from a patient perspective that it's typical you may be a person who's just recently lost enough vision that you can't use regular print and suddenly you have multiple services to remember that have non-compatible formats each requiring their own special device to play them some of them have weird sound quality issues like the text-to-speech types of things there's different learning curves for each one and different depths of those collections and the advantages of them one I didn't mention I'm going to go back to the page for you I forgot to mention the Learning Ally but that's an important one the Learning Ally folks focus on textbooks and so that's the one where if students are open for textbooks there would be a two for that they do some regular recording and some text-to-speech a combination of those to try to get things to students as quickly as possible because every year they make a change to the 17th edition of and you have to have that most reason why otherwise your professor won't let you use the old one exactly so that's very important too and then modern user expectations can be an issue too these apps have been wonderful for us for students for example on younger people even though the new digital popular player looks much more contemporary than the old beige cassette players it's still as large and doesn't look like stuff that your friends have necessarily so if you're a middle school or high school student there's a certain stigma that having this machine that made you stand out is different with the new apps if people are using an iPad or an iPhone or something you can download things and listen to them directly on your device and get past that sort of the stigma of having something that makes you sick out so that's my nice too so some of these complications are starting to resolve themselves but it's an issue to think about that it's still out there those remind me of those it's similar to people without vision or disabilities that even we have various places to get books from you can look at your public library go online to Amazon, go to Barnes & Noble and you're going to find different things in different places and sometimes when I'm looking for a particular book of some sort I will look in multiple ones to figure out where it's the easiest to get it from where's the cheapest to get it from who got paperback rather than the and it's not all the same they don't always have the same thing and do I want an ebook format that too? it's very similar everybody is dealing with now that there's so many more out there that's very true, we live in the paradox of choice there's a lot of different ways to approach all these things for sure using computers, which again if you're at the conference definitely check out Amanda's presentation next week that addresses some of these things using computers becomes the need for adaptive technology people's first thought is usually screen magnification which if people are just losing enough vision that they're not using regular print that is probably a good strategy to start with often times people end up needing screen readers and using speech recognition devices or the Dragon program both CR readers are still out there and currency readers, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has made a currency reader actually there's two now, there's a physical one patrons of ours can sign up and get, they go through the Bureau of Engraving and Printing you have to get them but there's also an app that can be downloaded directly that anyone can download that and you just point it to your camera to see which bills you have I've tried it and it's accurate so I was kind of hoping it might turn some of my ones it didn't work so it worked well so that was good, so those are some of the things you need to consider there some of the tricks with computers to think about though maintaining them like some of the PCop grant material over long periods of time it can get expensive and print out selections as programs change over time there's some connectivity issues especially in rural areas or out of the home where people have to consider using those things it can require some training in terms of how complex some of those interfaces are when you think about someone that's wanting to use a computer now you have a secondary level of learning to re-learn how to use the computer because the visual understanding of how it's been working in the non-visual interpretation of that it's worth considering that the visual impairment population tends to lean toward the elderly again just because age related issues bring up visual impairments and that means that there's usually a competing focus for people who are new or recently blinded they're thinking about things like orientation and mobility like how are they going to get around or even just up and down the street new ways of strategizing how they're going to cook and maintain their phones taking the proper medications when you can't use visual identification and they may have other health issues to contend with at the same time as well so it's one of those things where we are very sensitive to that here and when people contact us to initialize service that's the thing that we always keep in mind is that oftentimes you're who's used to doing things visually but is now struggling to do that and they have a lot of things on their mind so we want to make sure that that complicated matrix of all those different services that are at your core we want to make that as easy as possible for them and try to get materials prepared for them with a minimum of effort on their part so they can just get what they need it's very different when you haven't been blind or visually impaired from birth or from very young it's a whole different way of having to learn everything and that is the thing we consider that most of the patients that we serve at the average ages in the mid-80s at this point and so we do tend to see people who are recently blinded although we do have a lot of people who have been with us their whole lives that are even in that age gap too so it's a service where we try to provide what that particular patients needs are so you have some students and you have some older folks and all kinds of people that have different needs so we do try to be especially sensitive though to some of the complications of people who are older and recently blinded because they do have a lot to think about and they want their genes they want their reading to be as easy as possible so we can set it up so that it's fairly turnkey we have a conversation with them to make sure we know who their favorite authors are and their favorite subjects and the machine is super easy to use and we can just send it right out to them so that's the thing we consider inaccessible web design too I think most public libraries have done a good job of keeping up with proper design standards to do that if anyone is interested in WCAG standards there's a link on your power a lot of your web WordPress or your actual base of your websites they have that kind of thing built in so that you can click to make sure that it is or don't forget this is something you might want to look into as you're designing your site to add this app or something or add this plugin to help to really make sure you add make sure to check that stuff because you do want to make sure it works so it's important to see a couple of times we started a little late because of us so we'll go until you're done so with things to consider for accessibility in libraries if you're a member of the NLA or the ALA consider ASCLAG which is the working group for specialized libraries they deal with a lot of visual impairment issues as well as other impairments great group for thinking through different things in terms of public libraries and even physical design like how you might lay out a large print area maybe a little differently than the rest of your library to make it easier to even access the materials from the spine so we'll face things as much as possible the Marrakesh treaty I wanted to mention in here the United States has yet to ratify this but what that has to do with is it's a consortium of countries around the world I think 27 signed on now the US not being one of those unfortunately so far the Marrakesh treaty is to allow the exchange of foreign language materials between countries in these specialized formats for print disabilities what that means is that once the US really signs on to that we would be able to get materials in foreign languages but also English language materials from places like Ireland UK and so on we have occasional specific agreements but it goes back to copyright stuff where the materials that we circulate have to be published in the United States and if they're not published in the United States and yet popular we can't do anything about it so the Marrakesh treaty will help to simplify those laws by kind of creating a consent solution to exchange those things among programs similar to ours all over the world and I just wanted to remind people that there really isn't an intellectual freedom that you like to make sure that people have access to materials and the possibility pathways to those materials are working the slogan of the Library of Congress National Library sort of a second because it has always been that all may be it really does speak to what we do so this is their new logo here too so you have Alice in Braille and I have a little speaker on so that's been fun well did you have any questions that you know if anybody has any questions go ahead and type them into your go-to-webinar questions section or say I have microphones you can ask your question that way ask about anything that he's talked about today or if you have any questions about using these kind of services in your library how would you do it do you have anybody that you know of that might be you'd be able to help out with this but I think some things that some people don't assume about that they do assume about this is that it's just for people who are physically just just blind that's a visual impairment and they've been that way forever as you said your age of your patrons happens to be about average DTE but I learned about it was that it's not just about that if there's some you are eligible for this program if there's some physical reason why you like I was in an accident and even temporarily and I can't use my arms to hold a book so it's something like that you can sign up for this program and just temporarily have access to it until you're healed up and everything so it's anything that could impede your ability to read and you got to kind of think big about that not just think oh we have the old people coming in who are losing their sight it's beyond that and it's available for anybody that's yeah it's important to think that blindness is more of like a spectrum of visual impairment that anyone in that spectrum may have issues with print and yeah with things like accidents and we even have things for people who don't have the use of their hands for example we have things like SIPPOP controllers that can be sent to them to control the machine stopping and starting so there are a lot of people who are paralyzed or something yes absolutely there's a high volume machine that we can order that people can listen to if they have a lot of hearing loss as well they can plug headphones into this and it's much much louder like the other issues related they might be having other medical issues exactly yeah so we really try to there's lots of things to do so just think of anybody who might have any big reason why they have difficulty reading and reach out to Scott and say hey will this count can we help them and I'd like to really like your example if you've had some newsman coming into the library forever like they read voraciously you notice they're reading the large French and so you can see something is changing what kind of books they're selecting or if they're fading out of using the library because you can't see anymore reach out to them and say there's options you're not at loss yeah honestly even when they're just using the large print section that's the time to reach out to them that's really the time we can serve anyone who can't see to read what's considered regular print which is printed below a 14 point which is pretty small so a large print that is basically a dividing line once someone is into the point where they're only using large print that's when you want to know hey this is something that might be for you to help explain what you can read because not everything is going to be available in large print I don't know if you know if there's more things that are available this way than large print I don't know for sure but I would assume there probably aren't because large print is a pretty expensive proposition on publishers that have limited the number of items that work with that and this is a program that has been around since the 30s doing this so they've got they're doing it in that problem so it gives them more options of things they could read well it doesn't look like anybody had any questions while they're chatting so that's fine you just have everything they need to know actually thanks for tuning in to bring it to you yeah I guess like you mentioned you hadn't been on the show in a while I think since they moved over to the west wing here at the library commission we had three floors of office space and talk about when the rail was in our basement and the space across the hall from us came available and so they moved over there yeah there wasn't a point to slide in the archives about that move we had some yeah nautical issues of sorts I guess there's some water issues in the basement here so we're not in there anymore they're over across the hall, they have windows now it's very nice there are windows that really cheer us all up it's been a couple years in the sun now it's been great so I think we will wrap it up then if there are any questions if you do need more information go to our website anyone who is talking to the rail service and get you set up with anything getting to your library so thank you everyone for attending thank you SWAP for walking across the hall here if you hit escape we'll get out of here oh look there you are there's your email so that we'll wrap it up for today's show we'll show you Encompass Live our website is on here under education and training there it is Encompass Live webcast you can also type into Encompass Live into your browser of choice search engine of choice and so far in the world we have the only thing called Encompass Live I keep saying that so we come up with all your search results so that you can get to our website from there either from the commission site or just by searching for us we have our upcoming shows listed here but our archives as I said I'll show you is right here is the link beneath our upcoming shows that has all of our previous shows here this is last week shows about Leading, they have a few links to different things a lot of our recording Scott Slides will be listed here so you'll be able to access that potentially later today maybe tomorrow everything will be processed and up to YouTube everyone who attended this morning or who registered for a day show will get an email and we'll post it out on our mailing lists and Facebook page Twitter the usual so that you know when recording it's ready to watch normally at this point I would invite you to join us for next week's show but we are not doing your show next week Encompass Live is our weekly show we are on at 15 one weeks out of the year though the one week we take off is when we have our state the library association and school library association annual conference that's when we take off is everybody's at conference so we will not be on next week if you are attending check out go to conference you can register on site so if you haven't pre-registered which pre-registration was a few weeks ago head out to Carney if you didn't and show up and join us we have quite a few sessions from the library commission being done throughout the two days of the conference there we will also be doing a having a makerspace demo area I believe it's going to be physically near where the exhibits are we have a new libraries innovation studios makerspace grant we're going putting makerspace type of equipment into some libraries across the state over the next three years we're going to have all that equipment at the conference to demo and show you can try some of it and just look at some of it talk to people about what's going on with that so head to conference but our next show will be about ala's book club central anyone has heard about this this is the one where Sarah Jessica Parker is now involved and connected with ala and doing recommending books for a book club there's going to be more information I'm still working with Beth Nonesky who is the person in charge of ala with this or the book club central and getting on the show with some publishers enough authors that week that the show is actually happening which is October 18th is when they are going to be announcing their next book in this in the program the first title here no one is coming to save us was the first title that they did which was earlier this year but they're going to be announcing the next pick that week so hopefully we'll have all that on the show so if you're interested in ala's book club central I would Sarah Jessica Parker thinks we should read go ahead and sign up for that one and any of our other future shows that we have here I've got some November dates booked I've got other ones I'm finalizing so we'll look for updates here as I get everything nailed down for the upcoming months also end of the slide is on facebook so if you are a big facebook user give us a like over there we post announcements of the new shows are coming up here I had a reminder of today's show I'll be logging on the slide when the recordings are available I post on here as well so if you are on facebook and you use it to keep up with things head over there and give us a like and that wraps it up for this morning's show there we go make sure you're caught back thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you in two weeks on end of the slide bye