 Greetings. Oh, so. So, greetings. Welcome to our session on addressing the 7% problem. Today, we'll be talking about the frame project and the Carl ARL Marrakesh Treaty implementation project. My name is Victoria on from the University of Toronto, and I'm here today with Pascal Calarco from the University of Windsor, Catherine classic and the Association of Research Libraries, Bill Casdorf from Casdorf and Associates. Stephen Downey, the University of Illinois, and John Unsworth from the University of Virginia. And the Carl ARL pilot project implementation will be the first part of our presentation. So we're talking about the Marrakesh Treaty and the implementation of that treaty for accessibility and the full title of the Marrakesh Treaty is to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. So it is the first users rights treaty. It's historical and it's important, and it's linked to the human rights in the in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the Convention of Rights for people with disabilities. The goal of the Marrakesh Treaty is to end the book famine to change the availability of accessible formats from 7% to 1%. So the Marrakesh Treaty is a WIPO treaty agreement and it has 80 signatory countries. It was passed in June 2013 in Marrakesh, Morocco, and it provides an exception to copyright for the benefit of people who are blind visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled. It's an international treaty, and each country must ratify it and set its own enabling legislation. So the Marrakesh Treaty was the 20th key nation to exceed to the Marrakesh Treaty, and that signatory allowed Marrakesh to come into force on September the 30, 2016, three months after Canada's accession. The USA ratified on May the 8, 2019, and we now have 2080 ratifications to date with 37 more in process. The Marrakesh Treaty provides a legal framework and it allows each country to develop its own enabling legislation, and all the national laws must comply with the requirements of the treaty. However, there's there are variations in the legislative language among all of the Marrakesh Treaty so there isn't one implementation. It's the same as any other one. It has optional articles and Canada added a commercial availability clause and a royalties clause to our legislation. The United States did not. So the Marrakesh Treaty Task Force is working with Canadian authorized entities, the Bibliothèque Nationale et Archive Bibliothèque et Archive Nationale de Québec, CELA, which is the Center for Equitable Library Access, and NELS, which is the National Network for Equitable Library Services. We're working with those entities to understand how the legislation is operationalized in their process and what is required for the international lending component. As authorized entities, they are nonprofit entities, and they provide education or information access and authorized entities include libraries and schools and other and other kinds of educational and information services. And we've also been the Task Force has been also conferring with legal experts in Canada and the United States on the implicated implications of the differences in our laws. So when we want to do this pilot project together, we have to figure out how the two laws two sets of laws are going to work together. And in Canada and in this with this project the commercial availability clause is providing a lot of complications for us so it's quite problematic in the implementation. And that is with the production of the materials part of it and the export limitations. In the United States they, there are, there are other barriers but not the same barriers. As I said every implementation is different. So in section 1201 of the US Copyright Act. That is a section that prevents the breaking of technological measures or digital locks to access copyrighted works. Central to the Marrakesh Treaty is the ability to break the locks to make an accessible copy. So in the US this is going to be handled by the rulemaking process. And every three years the register of copyright issues exemptions for breaking the technical, the technological protection measures or the digital locks. In this year's rulemaking, the register of copyrights modified section 1201 regulatory language to reflect the relevant sections in the US Copyright Act that implement the Marrakesh Treaty, that section 121 a the register concluded that without the proposed modifications print disabled individuals would be adversely affected in their ability to engage in the non infringing uses. The language, it says that it will expand the description of intended beneficiaries. And it will expand the copyrighted works covered to include literary works and previously published music works that have been fixed in the form of text or notation, and adjust the reference to a market price of a mainstream copy, and instead use the, the word of the price of an inaccessible copy. In this year, the register of copyrights renewed a rule allowing temporary, the temporary right to create accessible versions of motion pictures, and to be able to use assistive technologies for people who are blind, visually impaired or have disabilities. In this and previous rule makings the register of copyrights as acknowledged that technological protection measures interfere with the use of assistive technologies. And the register also acknowledged that there's a significant role of ebooks in improving accessibility for persons who are blind, visually impaired or print disabled. So the Carl ARL task force for the implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty kicked off in September 2020. And the pilot is a collaboration between the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries, on behalf of their member libraries. They have a collection of library research libraries in these associations in Canada and the United States, and they have a collective holding of 760 million print and electronic works. The pilot libraries are two American libraries research libraries Cornell University and the University of Florida, and two Canadian research libraries, York University, and bibliotheque as she has to get back. The leader of the work of the task force has put put together a policy a metadata systems and a beneficiary working group. And the goal is to implement the requesting and borrowing functions within each country to allow for cross border exchange, and then after the pilot is concluded to use the results of that pilot to recommend an implementation plan for Carl and area libraries. So the metadata working group began in this year in collecting sample records from each pilot library for each format. And we reviewed the mark format fields used per library and per format and then with that decided on what required fields we're going to use in in the pilot, what would be mandatory what would be mandatory if applicable, what would be recommended is optional, and the considerations are myriad we looked at controlled text and free text fields, multilingual provisions, and how each field would function with a mark the market edit software. So we'll decide on fields for the pilot and evaluate and recommend the fields for the broader implementation. So I'll turn it over to Pascal now for the systems part of the implementation and other considerations. Thanks, Victoria. So when we look at this project, one would think that this is fairly straightforward. It's not that much different from a traditional circulation or resource sharing. Perhaps with the only difference that in America catch fulfillment, the materials do not need to be returned to the library. Next slide. We can think of five high level areas of work in this implementation. We already talked about the metadata issues. There's also digitization workflows that we need to consider libraries have been digitizing works for, you know, a couple decades now. But we haven't typically been producing those things in EPUB format, which may be the preferred formats for integration with assistive technologies. There's a variety of approaches to discovery, you know, do we put all of the metadata records in one place like in WorldCat or Hottie Trust or the Internet Archive, or do we have these be a more distributed approach, or do we do something kind of hybrid. Also, with the digital repository, do we use a federated approach similar to DPLA, or have geographically defined territorial repositories in each country, or use each individual library as an endpoint for the digital item and then have shared metadata in a discovery layer above that. Finally, we have identity and access management issues, because we have to ensure that these DRM free versions of works are only available to beneficiaries. Next slide. These are some challenges and decision points we've identified to date, starting with wanting to understand the functional requirements of users of beneficiaries and their technology kind of ecosystem. We need to consider that this is going to scale across the globe eventually. And so we need to make sure that we have the lowest barriers for libraries to be able to implement this. I mentioned the variety of approaches with metadata and identity and access management and the repository for accessible works. You know, ideally we want to digitize a work once and then have that be added to the corpus that's available globally. Next slide. Speaking about the user needs, we have started to engage with CNIB, and we'll be talking to the National Library for the Blind, and also focus on our campuses at the pilot libraries. And these are some questions we're going to initially ask of the campus partners and advocates for those who have print disabilities, and this is the focus of our beneficiary working group. Next slide. We're going to talk about the discovery of accessibility works. You know, eventually this will scale to any, you know, public or academic library in North America and eventually any of the Marrakesh treaty countries. We want to make sure that these are all searchable and discoverable by all beneficiary users regardless of where they're located. And how do we bring these descriptions together best in a consolidated catalog from those contributing libraries. Storage and preservation of these texts is also of key consideration. So we need to do this within the context of digital preservation. The formats can change over time, as we know that these formats continue to develop. And also the basic level of bit integrity can be compromised. So we need things in place to look at that as well. Next slide. The place that we're going to start is with our four partner libraries. And so we have recommendations for revising mark templates in each of those libraries will implement those templates in the four libraries. We'll probably create local creation or local location codes in each of the library services platforms that we have. And we'll create a either local or shared repository to store those texts in will probably create a new patron group for Marrakesh beneficiaries and allow only beneficiaries to be able to access that location and that underlying repository. And then we'll start with library to library fulfillment requests similar to the ILL workflows that we currently do. We recognize that eventually, of course we want direct patron discovery and delivery of all of these. So we're learning from other projects, including the frame project here and others in this work where I mentioned we're going to talk to campus accessibility officers and then also liais with beneficiary advocacy groups. Next slide. This is the list of people who are on the task force, and we have a central email address where you can get in touch with us. We'd love to hear your thoughts and invite you to help us out with this project. That's the last slide for our project. I'll now turn it over to Bill to start with theirs. Thank you very much. Let me get my screen share going here. All right, there we go. So I'm, I'm Bill Kasdorf I'm a publishing technology consultant and I do a lot of work in editorial production workflows with a big focus on accessibility. I do a lot of standards work. Most relevant in this context are the World Wide Web Consortium I'm publishing, Global Publishing Evangelist for the WPC and NISO. Let me get to full screen here. So the image that I'm showing on this slide is a picture of a woman looking shocked and saying what you just did all that work remediating that book and you can't share it. Well, I have to say I could have used a picture of John Unsworth here instead, because that's really the origin of the frame project he was a professor at Brandeis at the time, had a blind student was majoring in film. And so they had to create what are called audio descriptions. It's a confusing name because it's a description of the video aspect of the movie. You can imagine how much work is involved in doing that and at the, at the end of all that work, he discovered that those audio descriptions would not get shared. And he thought reasonably enough, this is ridiculous. It turns out that it's, it's still to this day very common that the disability services offices that are commonly called DSOs. These are the people that take a resource asset that's inaccessible to a given student and fix it basically, which is called remediation. For example, doing, making those audio descriptions or putting image descriptions in for images or tagging a PDF, etc. And it's widely believed that they cannot share those files, and they think it's not legal to do that. And what they really think is that it's a violation of copyright. And that's in fact not true, but as an indication of how common this is. Blackboard is the most common learning management system in their accessibility aspect is called Ally. Nicholas Matthias, the product owner of Ally, did a study of all the materials they've checked in since 2019. The two thirds of those educational materials that they checked in for accessibility were duplicates only one third of them were unique and that was out of 825.72 million assets. So, John basically wrote a grant, put together a team. That is a collaboration between academic libraries, repositories and technologists and the disability services offices at the participating universities. Sorry, this zoom is blocking my advancing my slides. It's a four year project funded by melon actually two grants we got initial grant, a two year grant and we are now in the middle of the first year of the second grant of the project. It's, as I said, a combination of libraries repositories, DSOs and university presses, and the big part of the, the work involved in frame is creating a repository where we can provide federated access to metadata and source files and other source files, files for a DSO to remediate, and then a place for them to put the files that have been remediated so somebody else can use those files. And then the DSOs have access to retrieve or deposit files and ensure that the recipients are qualified and that's really one really important aspect that you need to understand that the DSOs provide is they're the ones that are responsible for ensuring that a given student or faculty member or recipient of the quality of the mediator files is qualified to get them. The libraries and DSOs are at George Mason, Illinois, Northern Arizona, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Virginia. And the repositories are Benetech Bookshare, which is a repository of all remediate, all accessible content. HottieTrust, which is millions and millions of assets. I think most people seeing this knows what HottieTrust is and you surely know what the internet archive is. There's also a lot of content that's available between these three repositories. And then the fourth repository that we've created at Virginia to hold all the materials that did not originate in one of those three. Most DSOs obtain the files to remediate either from the publisher or the bookstore or a faculty member or a service like access to network, etc. Those files that they are able to interchange are put into Emma. And we're going to be adding ACE, which is the accessible content portal from the Ontario Council University Libraries and that will be our test of Marrakesh because of testing out the kind of differences in the exchange principles between the US and Canada. That's going to be interesting. So because of this misconception about copyright, the first thing we did was really an environmental scan that focused on addressing these legal issues for the DSOs. There have been a group of legal experts in January 2019 at ARL in Washington to an accession called the law and accessible text that resulted in a white paper reconciling civil rights and copyrights the law and accessible text so that very clearly documents that copyright does not prevent the sharing of these remediated files to qualified recipients. In that context, we also identified, not the not the legal activity but the frame activity in general, that there was no way identified two things that are really needed. There was no really good metadata model for remediated assets to describing how they have been remedied what are they and how they've been remediated. So we have created a metadata model and are implementing that. And then also clear need for education about accessibility and remediation in academic and library contexts. So for the metadata model, four different main aspects, a lot of unique identifiers are needed to make, manage all this content. And by the way this metadata model really has two uses one is discovery of assets across all four repositories and so that involves a kind of a massive unified search project that's been ongoing since the beginning. And metadata associated with these remediated files so because that what a what a DSO at one university is looking for is a file that has been remedied in a certain way that's how their student needs the file to be remediated and we need they need to be able to trust that the metadata can can tell them that. So, in addition to the bibliographic metadata and administrative metadata, we have a host of remediation metadata things like format file type features obviously if a book has tables or equations those often require a lot of work in remediation. So how how clean is the text on on the in the source file. Any comments that the previous remediator can make. And then of course EPUB accessibility metadata. And so at this point, still working on the unified search to refine that across the repositories and also refining the user interface for the deposit of the mediator resources. And also developing a more standardized batch upload process because you know one thing that happened in the first phase of the frame project is that all of these universities had a backlog of files in fact it was, it was somewhat amusing that many of them didn't want to admit that they actually kept these files because they had been under them, you know, misconception that they were not able to share them but they put so much work into them that they were not about to just trash that right so they had. The libraries had hundreds of files to contribute. But of course they all had their own way of keeping track of what what the files were and what had been done to them etc so fairly messy process we're trying to standardize that in phase two. And then integrating with two new partners repository partner ace and university Ohio State. NISO is planning to create a working group in 2022 to standardize the metadata model that we've come up with so that it's, it can become international, ultimately an NC standard. And also to create a membership organization so that this project is self sustaining. We don't expect to get more money from melon, but we do expect to add more universities. So, the membership model is how that will be enabled this this project to be self sustaining going forward. And then Steven is heading up the project for creating these educational models modules on information services for graduate professional curriculum. So at this point, I will turn it over to Steven. Thank you ever so much. Fantastic presentation. Thank you. My other colleagues for their great presentation so far I'm Steven Downey and I, I'm a professor of library and information science at the school information sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana champagne. I'm sort of my contribution I'm coming, coming at it from library professional educator role, I'm also the associate dean for research so I find all of these unique problems, absolutely fascinating. So, what we're doing at Illinois and contribution to the project. If we go back to the list of people that we could. So, I just wanted to mention, it's teamwork. And what you'll see there in the dramatic persona is a wide range of skills that are coming together. You have me as sort of an academic educator. And we have professors from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and she is an expert, a world renowned expert on creating accessible and teaching accessible information systems. And she's helping us lead our education program. We are working in conjunction with Kyle Rift guess who is the Illinois preservation librarian and has been working on the frame Emma systems metadata processing since the beginning of the project so there's practitioner knowledge there. His colleague JJ Pianke is the applied health sciences librarian. And that's the unit in which our disability service organization resides at University of Illinois it's called Dres disability resources and educational services so there's that lia liaison there. Professor Pianke is also an expert in teachers in the area of accessibility disability services. Jacob jet is a postdoc of mine, and he works with me at the Hardy Trust Research Center, his expertise his PhD is in metadata. And as we'll see in a minute, there is that tie in in the project where we need to learn more and teach more about the unique metadata issues that arise when dealing with these kinds of services. And then we have Angie Anderson, who's from Dres at Illinois and she has been historically part of this project from the beginning she has been doing remediations of texts for many, many years, and is also consulting on how to create the foundation that Dean Unsworth would like to create to sustain all these efforts. And she's assisted at the Dres at Illinois with Alice Cordain so what we're seeing here is a great team of different sets of skills and the reason we need all these skills. Next slide please. We're developing a formal course and the formal course is going to do some multiple goodies. We, with this professional for masters of library information science will be delivering it online so other folks from other schools can join without difficulty. And so to help train library information science professionals to to take on these kinds of roles in this new environment. But also we're going to fragment the materials and make it more modular so that we can take, we can grab, let's say the lesson on metadata and have it stand alone. As a possible resource, because we need to educate multiple people in this realm we, the people that work have their home bases in the library is one constituent but you also have people that have their home bases in the teaching units, or in the disability service offices, and they don't know about metadata it's not they're it's not in their wheelhouse. So we're trying to bridge uses education as a bridge between the different communities the different offices and stakeholders. And so that's why we're releasing materials online and as part of the project in our promise to our funders of the Melon Foundation, the materials will be released under an open license so other library information science education professionals can grab them use them libraries and DSOs can grab them use them to train staff to train graduate students as they come on board with the various projects. Next please. So, in general, we're looking to provide general background on disability issues in higher higher education settings so students what kinds of disabilities whether challenges what are the accommodations. are available or necessary. We need to explain the work of DSOs and organizations like Dres to the library side and explain the library side to the DSO stakeholders so again that bridging aspect and explain how to use the metadata. There's a unique kind of metadata being developed by Bill and Jacob and the team writ large. So learning about how to use it how to create it and how to make it take advantage of it is important for all stakeholders and sort of nitty gritty of document file formats and different automated techniques that are available for remediation. And also to explain the legal frameworks so that they're better informed within their organizations on what they can do this, this panel, for example, has helped highlight the legal, the legal support for our actions that needs to get propagated to the broader community. And of course, to introduce to all the stakeholders, new opportunities for research, what's what's next what can we do to make things better. Next please. And over the course of the last year is the team coming together under the primary intellectual leadership of Professor Jay. And these are the tentative sort of units in our proposed master's class syllabus so you can see the different aspects that I've been trying to articulate here represented as weekly lectures weekly modules for the class so we have design guidelines accessibility in retrieval systems which is specialty of Professor Jay. And understanding the general climate of of work with disabilities and how to do user studies and so on next slide please. Design tools, the accommodations challenges and designing an assessment of the systems and services that frame participants with undergo and of course, you know, what are the open questions, open challenges in services with people with disabilities. Next please. And so that sort of wraps up on the education front. Please keep an eye out we'll try and broadcast when the modules are up for sort of public consumption we are aiming to launch the class in fall 2022. So I suspect things will be more available in the summer of 2022. And I'm going to turn off my mic and my video and that Professor Unsworth take over. So, in academic year 2022 to 23, we anticipate opening Emma to membership by universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. If you're interested, please email us at Emma for accessibility that's the number four at Virginia.edu. We will ask for libraries to partner with disability service offices on their campus in this membership. But at the moment, I do not anticipate charging libraries for membership. We do anticipate charging the offices where disability services report which is normally the office of the provost and or the vice president for student affairs, or their equivalents. Those will be used to sustain and develop the Emma service to expand its coverage from print to other media like video and to continue developing the metadata schema for describing human and automated remediation that's been applied to make content accessible. And Bill I think the next slide is yours. Hi everybody I need to get back to my controls here. I'm not sure if you're still seeing my screen, but the last slide is the links to the resources. We're not seeing it. Nothing. So these are the findings from an initial environmental scan that begins the frame project. Here's the legal white paper from the legal analysis and the link to to join Emma to those that are interested. So, and then here are the, here's the contact information for the four of us. You want to email us. Happy to happy to talk and provide any insight and information. Thank you very much.