 Hello, my name is Victoria Owen, I'm Information Policy Scholar Practitioner at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Task Force on the Implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty. Today our panel will inform you about the project that research libraries have taken on to work collaboratively to bridge the gap for accessible works. I'll give an overview of the project and you will have the context for the groundbreaking work that is being done on a lot of fronts, on metadata, on systems, on work with end users who are the beneficiaries of the treaty. The Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled was adopted in June 2013. It's an historic treaty because it's the first treaty with the human rights focus at its core and it is the first users rights treaty in the history of the World Intellectual Property Organization. The goal of the Marrakesh Treaty is to end the book famine experienced by millions of people worldwide with print disabilities where accessible formats exist for less than 10% of the works that are available worldwide. The dearth of accessible formats is caused in part by constraints integral to the copyright laws that the Marrakesh Treaty sought to resolve through mandatory exceptions and limitations. Once a country decides to ratify or exceed to the Marrakesh Treaty, that Marrakesh Treaty country develops its own national enabling legislation. All national laws must comply with the requirements of the treaty, however there is variation in the legislative language among countries. So we're experiencing that in the Canada US situation. The Marrakesh Treaty had optional articles and Canada opted for a commercial availability clause and a royalty clause and the United States did not. So ARL Carl Task Force is working with Canadian authorized entities and American authorized entities to understand how the legislation is operationalized in their procedures and what if anything needs to be taken into consideration for international lending. We've also conferred with legal experts in Canada and the US on the implications of the different national laws. So our pilot project started in September 2020. The pilot implementation project between ARL and Carl on behalf of their member libraries which are about 140 in total and they collectively hold approximately 760 million print and electronic titles. So there are two American university libraries in the pilot Cornell University and the University of Florida and on the Canadian side we have York University, the Bibliotheque Archive Nationale de Québec and Université de Montréal. The task force has been working, has working groups on policy, on metadata systems and on the user community. And the task force goal is to implement those requesting and borrowing procedures within each country and then have them work also in the cross border milieu where those national laws come to play a significant role. So now I'm going to hand it over to the panel who will describe the various threads of policy, metadata systems and beneficiaries that are being explored and braided together to form the implementation plan. Thank you. I'm Catherine Klosek, Director of Information Policy at the Association of Research Libraries or ARL. Earlier we heard from Victoria Owen who talked a bit about Canada's unique implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty. Now I'm going to give a high-level overview of U.S. implementation in a brief discussion of ways that contracts can complicate access to accessible works. Let's start with the legal background. In the U.S. the Copyright Act and case law provide a strong legal foundation for libraries and other authorized entities to create copies for accessibility purposes. Section 121 of the Copyright Act, sometimes referred to as the Chaffee Amendment explicitly authorizes libraries and other authorized entities to make copies for accessibility purposes. And section 121A allows for the import and export of those works to facilitate cross border exchange. In addition, courts in the U.S. have held that making copies accessible for use by people with print disabilities is a fair use. And fair use is a fundamental doctrine codified in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act. Fair use allows for the use of works protected by copyright in certain circumstances without permission from the rights holder. In addition to the legal foundation I just described, regulations allow for the creation, storage, and reuse of accessible versions of motion pictures and e-books in educational settings for people who are blind, visually impaired, or have print disabilities. The Librarian of Congress renews or issues these regulations every three years through a rulemaking process established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with the DMCA. These regulations allow certain users to circumvent technological protection measures or digital locks to access copyrighted works under specific circumstances. Despite these laws and regulations, contract terms can still restrict access for people with print disabilities. In contractual terms for e-books, publishers or vendors typically include language prohibiting users from breaking those digital locks. So even if regulations say you can circumvent or break digital locks, contracts can still prevent this. And it can be difficult for libraries to negotiate anti-circumvention provisions with large vendors or publishers. In this way, publishers and vendors are using contracts to extend their rights and to limit rights that libraries and beneficiaries and other users would otherwise have under copyright law. There are some ways that libraries can take action to ensure access to digital works for people with print disabilities. Libraries can include language preserving fair use or other rights in negotiations for database agreements. Libraries can rely on model license language to require licensors to comply with disability laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. Libraries can also support the disability community and advocating for works to be born accessible or published in accessible formats to reduce the time and burden that it takes for libraries to remediate these works. Accessing works in a timely manner is critical to keep up with coursework and research. For more discussion and information on this topic, please see knowyourcopyrights.org. Elsie, it's great to be with you today. Do you mind just starting with an introduction? Sure, absolutely. So I've been at the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled as the Foreign Language Librarian since July 2020. So my main job is to select foreign language books for the NLS collection and then I also manage our Marrakesh Treaty implementation. I came to NLS after about 10 years give or take as an academic librarian at the University of Maryland and my job there was to work with Spanish, French, Italian, German and mostly collection development but also reference instruction and that kind of thing. Before that I worked as a translation project manager at the State Department and then in the private sector as well which is where I got exposure to a really broad variety of languages. Thank you and so as the Foreign Language Librarian at NLS, can you tell us a little bit about what your day-to-day job looks like? Sure, it's really varied which is one of the reasons why I like it. So overall it's my job to pick out the books in languages other than English for the NLS collection but on a day-to-day basis that plays out in a number of different ways. So I might look over a list of Spanish books that have come out recently. I check to see which ones we already have, maybe how I could get the ones that we don't so I check the Accessible Book Consortium's Global Book Service Catalog. I look for commercial audiobooks that we could then convert into the more accessible Daisy format or if no audio versions exist then we narrate a regular print or a e-book from scratch. Other days I might be trying to track down something like Albanian or Gujarati or Amharic based on patron requests that get passed on from our network libraries around the country. Since I also work on Marrakesh I might talk to my colleagues about ways to tweak our workflow to improve things on that front and then I always have a couple special projects that I have kind of you know work on as I have time. Right now one of the ones that I'm really excited about I'm sorry if to cough every time. So one of the projects I'm excited about is actually working with the Hispanic Division which is another part of the Library of Congress and we're working to produce fully accessible anthologies of some of the original author recordings that they have downtown. So I will say I don't work directly with our patrons in this job. I'm really focused on building our national collection but I do support the folks in our network libraries around the country who work with patrons directly. And do you mind briefly describing your approach to collecting Marrakesh Treaty content in particular? Absolutely so at this point we have two main approaches. So one is setting up agreements directly with other authorized entities around the world to exchange our content directly. So that's one option. The other is sharing and also obtaining books through the Accessible Books Consortium's Global Book Service Catalog and then in both cases for English books I pulled together you know availability check availability and then the rest of our collection development team actually reviews those to decide which we're going to add. And then we convert those. We do use a slightly different format than other countries. It's basically the difference between Daisy 2.02 and Daisy 3. We catalog them and then we upload those for our patrons to access through our online braille and audio reading download service or through their network library in their state. And then it's my job to decide which books in which non-English languages we add sometimes that means searching for a particular book that I know we want. Other times it means you know somebody needs books in Urdu for example and I'm trying to track down what's available. So we do follow the same collection development policy for Marrakesh books as we do for our whole collection and that's available on our website. It's very similar to your standard U.S. public library collection policy. No. You mentioned the Accessible Books Consortium a few times now. Can you talk about how the Marrakesh Treaty has shifted your approach to obtaining content from the Accessible Books Consortium? Sure. So you know Analyst has worked with ABC for many years and before that before it was known as ABC it was the Tiger program and we were working with them too. But what it'll say is that before the broader implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty around the world for every single book that we wanted to get from another country copyright permissions had to be requested you know from the original copyright holder. So as you can imagine that took ages so it meant that we weren't really able to get that many books through that platform but as more and more countries join the the numbers have just skyrocketed you know. So we've found you know we went from getting like a few books in French every year to getting literally thousands of books in 23 different languages just since we the U.S. fully implemented in 2020. It's amazing. And how has Analyst been able to better serve beneficiaries thanks to the Marrakesh Treaty? Well as you can imagine you know just one of the biggest benefits is just this huge volume increase that we've been able to achieve through Marrakesh. There's just so many more books available. So as I mentioned you know legal implementation finished up in the U.S. in 2020 since then we've actually added over 4,000 audio and Braille books to the collection that were produced by other countries. So you know we always always max out our production budget so things that NLS is actually producing so that means that all 4,000 plus of those books are above and beyond what we would have been able to do without Marrakesh. So you know you think we think other countries do think sharing around the world and you think foreign language but the fact is 50% of what we've added through the Marrakesh Treaty is actually in English. You know Canada, New Zealand, the UK, all kinds of folks are sharing books as well and that means that we can actually meet the needs of the biggest group of our patrons while still finding things like books in Finnish that only a few people are going to use but that we never could have gotten before Marrakesh was implemented. And on the flip side you know we've been able to share our full collection of eligible books through ABC's Global Book Service so that means that we've put out over 100,000 audio and Braille books. Those are getting downloaded from GBS an average of 150 times a month at this point and that's going out to authorize entities and patrons directly as well in 41 different countries which is a pretty big impact for materials that we were already producing and couldn't have shared before Marrakesh. And to what extent does NLS serve academic and university students? So I mean NLS's collection and honestly that of lots of our counterparts around the world's libraries for the blind and print disabled special libraries like us there they tend to be more public library collections. Some of our our counterparts around the world do collect textbooks and also like K through 12 type educational materials but I do think that you know that a lot of our original language literature you know we collect Daniel Steele, we have James Patterson and we have lots of stuff that you might buy in the airport at the grocery store but we also have a lot of really high quality literature that I think would probably benefit students in academia. Thank you and finally from your perspective how can research libraries improve services to Marrakesh beneficiaries? So the first thing I'll recommend is is you know encouraging any folks who your research libraries are working with to sign up for NLS services and that can augment whatever they might already have on campus. You know it's and it's not just getting access to our collections you know they won't necessarily find every book that they need for their their research available through our collection but our network libraries in each state provide a wide variety of services that could be of use to eligible researchers so not just the books themselves but things like figuring out you know where else they might be able to get something transcribed into Braille or you know getting equipment all that kind of support they're they're really great at helping people with that and you know I spent 10 years in academia and I've you know worked with CNI in the past so I do think that that research libraries and campus disability services offices in general could make a huge difference by sharing the accessible materials that they create for students with an entity like the Accessible Books Consortium. I know in so many cases those are just created as one-offs right if a student requests it for a class and then they get it in the format that they need and then that's it right but you know with with the Chafee Amendment and then you know the the Advent of the Marrakesh Treaty I think that a lot of those materials could legally be shared and I know that English language university materials are in huge demand worldwide you know we've we've seen that time and time again and then I'd say just a pitch for ensuring that all of your online library platforms are actually accessible for patrons who are you know relying on screen readers to to interact with your systems and then also train your staff to support patrons with print and disabilities who might come in and need help in person you know those would kind of be my biggest tips from from NLS's perspective I'd say. Well Kelsey thanks for all the work that you do and for sharing with us is there anything else you want to share? No I mean I just I'd emphasize what a huge boon to our collections and our patrons participating in the Marrakesh Treaty has been and you know just the huge increase even since I started in this position in July 2020 you know it's not even been three years and it's it's been an exponential increase in availability and interaction and it's it's just been really amazing to see I feel like I showed up at exactly the right time. That's awesome well thank you so much. Yeah absolutely. Hello everyone I'm here with Judith Russell the Dean of Libraries at the University of Florida. She's going to share with us some of her reflections in being involved with the ARL Carl Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Task Force. I might start off with a question asking you Judy what do you think that the libraries of Florida have learned about supporting accessibility in research libraries through participating in this project? It took many years of expert and intense negotiations to develop the treaty language and then get it adopted by the US and Canadian governments. Now we're at last addressing implementation which has its own set of challenges but it's a real privilege to be part of this effort to improve access to information for the print disabled. As you might expect the devil is in the details and we are digging deep exploring options to implement an efficient and cost effective system that will be easy for beneficiaries to use to locate and obtain the information they need and for content providers to participate in this effort. Very interesting. What are some of the continuing challenges in advancing services to the print disabled from your perspective on university campuses? One challenge is our own efforts to make the content for which we are responsible accessible. We have the library press at UF and we pride ourselves on our commitment to producing accessible content. As part of the work of the Marrakesh Task Force we submitted a recent open access textbook for testing. We were confident that it was fully accessible and we learned that it was not. The deficiencies were relatively minor and we were able to correct them with the assistance of our contractor. As a result of the test the contractor updated its software for converting our publications to accessible ebooks which benefited all of their customers. We consulted with the University of Florida Press which uses the same vendor and we both realized that we need to include testing our publications to confirm their accessibility in our production process. Perhaps more importantly we realized that all publishers large and small have a great challenge to make retrospective adjustments to other titles for which we are responsible. Our task force needs to address the methods for discovery and access and also become strong advocates for development of tools to make the retrospective conversion of our own titles and those of other publishers affordable so we can unlock that important content. It's almost like revising books upon occasion and going back to that content and updating it and making it more relevant for readers. How can research libraries ready themselves to expand services to the print disabled in your view? We will all need to expand our outreach to the print disabled users directly and by increasing our partnerships with support groups on campus such as our disability resource center here at UF. Many of us in research libraries have OER initiatives and we need to increase internal training of our staff so we remain vigilant about the opportunities and challenges of producing truly accessible content. We also need to engage with the staff at our service bureau the Florida virtual campus FLVC which has its own OER initiatives on behalf of the state university and college systems. FLVC is actively supporting our participation in the Marrakesh task force and learning through that process. Access for the print disabled needs to be included in all of our efforts from the beginning of the editorial and production process for OER and other content we produce and manage and we need to address it in our licenses for content that we acquire from other providers. To fulfill our commitment to the print disabled we will need to see grant and other funding for retrospective conversion of our content that's not yet accessible. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this today Judy. I have one final question. What conversations might we want to have with our campus partners whether those are disability support offices, accessibility services, university presses, those kinds of partners? Well as noted above the conversation with the University of Florida press has already begun and they share our commitment to provide content that's verified as accessible going forward and our concern about the investment in converting existing publications that are not currently fully accessible. The campus accessibility services remain our key partners in reaching the beneficiaries on campus. We also want to work with other partners to identify and serve beneficiaries in the broader community and throughout the state, university and college systems. I want to conclude by quoting Victoria Owen Chair of the ARL Carle task force. The work of implementing the Marrakesh treaty positions the task force and the research library community to expand the boundaries and embrace the opportunity to add accessible as an essential component of open. I agree with her. This is an important clarification of our mission as research libraries. We should extend our work in open access toward ensuring that our publications are both open and accessible. Library and publisher OA platforms should be assessed for accessible outputs and enhanced to become universally accessible. I hope all of you who are listening today will embrace with us the commitment to make accessible an essential component of open. Lots to think about there. Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts today, Judy. Thank you, Pascal. Hello. I'm Joy Kirchner, Dean of Libraries at York University. I'm delighted to provide the dean's perspective on this project. In answer to the first question, what I have learned about supporting accessibility and research libraries through participating in this project, I think I'd like to highlight that the project has provided me with a welcome perspective on how we're doing at our institution in comparison to other institutions and also an opportunity for mutual sharing. The need is great. In 2019, for instance, we hosted an accessibility symposium. Really, the impetus for that accessibility symposium was really to learn how we were doing. We've had a long-established accessibility service within our libraries, but we weren't sure whether we've kept up with the latest technologies and so forth. Much to our surprise, we were delighted with our hybrid event, this is pre-pandemic, that over 500 participants signed on, all through ARL libraries, all through North America. We knew that we were on to something that there was a real need for associations to really put some other attention to accessibility and how they can support the work. It is important then, from my perspective, that our two associations have joined together to work on this project. Through this project, I also learned there are a range of support models throughout ARL libraries. There tends to be more support from those institutions that must comply with accessibility compliance laws or mandates, and I also learned there is much we need to do to provide technical infrastructure to share accessible content between our institutions. Your second question was, what are some of the continuing challenges in advancing services to the print disabled on university campuses? I would say, even within institutions like mine where there is strong accessibility services and associated services within libraries, we will still often hear complaints from students that their instructors need education on how best to support them. There's also a lack of understanding of what universal design means. So, an educational campaign is key, from my point of view, that there is a great need on our campus to really share our understanding and supports for persons with disabilities on our campuses. I would also say that from the library side, from the point of view of providing services, timeliness of receiving syllabus, course content request is key to helping students be successful. We must be alerted soon enough to have the material ready as quickly as possible to support students and faculty with disabilities, and in this respect, I think cross-border offerings is extremely important. We've heard that there are significant issues when non-English materials part of the curriculum for those with print disabilities. Access to non-English accessible content will really help. Finding understanding that persons with disabilities must cope with a lot in academic settings. Learning what coping mechanisms are helping folks to be successful in their academics and in their campus experience is critical to understanding how the libraries can help in a multitude of ways. In answer to your next question, what do research libraries need to resource to provide these services? I think it really does come back to education. Some of the biggest issues is that the course syllabus is not given to us in a timely way, either because the students don't have it, or it's just not provided, or there isn't an awareness that the material needs to be given to us as soon as possible, and it's because content isn't always easily and timely available, especially for some of the concerns around non-English content, for instance. It can take our staff significant time getting the materials ready for the students. I also think that dedicated and experienced staff is important. If one does not have it in your own institution, it could potentially be provided through your library consortia. Also excellent partnerships with central university services that support students and faculty with disabilities so that you can leverage expertise and supports between operations. Developing a strong coordination model within your campus so students are not left with wondering who handles what and obviously to prevent duplication of services. Your next question, how can research libraries ready themselves to expand services to the print disabled? I would say a great starting point with any new service is to create a really good business plan and sustainability plan based on an environmental scan of needs on campus. As part of that work interview, meet those with disabilities to hear directly how the library can support faculty and students. I think it's also critical that we spend more time with the community you want to serve and learn from them. Given strong privacy requirements, it may not be easy to identify students or faculty who have disabilities, so you may want to look at other organizations even outside of one's campus for the best advice on the best way forward. We learned from our own students that approaching the work with understanding that we are all disabled with something and to approach services from that humanizing connection is key to our ability to provide a good experience for students with disabilities and a greater feeling of inclusiveness for them. Rapid access to accessible content and knowing the adaptive technologies that work best for that content is also important. I would also suggest a review of the variety of tools or technical solutions that can help persons with disabilities based on actual scenarios students and faculty find themselves in in academic settings. We learned that frequently the onus is on persons with disabilities to be tech savvy and to have awareness of tools and software to help them if we can provide that kind of guidance it will help the community greatly. Finally, affordable content needs to be understood for this community. Students with disabilities typically have greater costs associated with supporting their content needs. In answer to your next question, what conversations might be important to have with other campus partners? Really any department that serves students is critical to understanding how the campus can support students and faculty with disabilities. Start with a pilot with one of the partners to understand more what is needed as a starting point potentially. Consider working with your library consortia to see how they can help you expand capacity and grow expertise in this arena. I'm very grateful at York we have long-established campus partnerships however we can always do more and I was very pleased that recently this year York created an accessibility liaison model where a centralized accessibility expert linked to every department and faculty therefore we have our own accessibility expert that is part of our liaison to the libraries. I think this will really help foster greater coordination of services across campus. If your institution is at the beginning of the exploration I would reach out to the campus student services unit and find out what is available for students with disabilities and explore how the libraries can help. Thank you for your time today. Hi my name is Pascal Calarco. I'm one of two visiting program officers to ARL and CARL for the Marrakesh Treaty Library Implementation Task Force. My focus has been on the technology and infrastructure needs for prototyping this within the project. I'm a librarian at the University of Windsor a CARL member library in Ontario Canada. I've worked in academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada for almost 28 years and have worked with four different integrated library systems during my career. Hi my name is Daniel Cromwell. My title is system specialist for technical services. I work at the Florida Virtual Campus out of Gainesville Florida. The organization is actually headquartered in Tallahassee Florida. We serve 12 universities and 28 colleges. I have a background in cataloging, record loading, and manipulation. I've worked with Notice, Olive, and now Alma as integrated library systems. So the work of the systems implementation group on the task force has been to examine systems used by ARL and CARL member libraries to articulate and implement a strategy for prototyping potential solutions or approaches to providing services to Marrakesh beneficiaries. One big part of this work was also to document and implement the experimental RDA mark recommendations in these systems. So Daniel, what were our two consortia in Florida and in Ontario trying to collaborate on for the ARL-CARL Marrakesh Treaty Library Implementation Task Force? Well we wanted to prototype discovery and system configuration for circulation of accessible resources to users with print disabilities between institutions in US and Canadian library systems using the capabilities of Alma Library Services Platform and Primo Discovery Tool. Alma and Primo is a good platform for this work as the majority of ARLs currently use this in their libraries. So if we document what configuration changes and options there are here, a greater number of ARL member libraries could participate in supporting Marrakesh Treaty beneficiaries with their information needs. Our approach I would say has also been very practical. We wanted to see what we could accomplish with the existing capabilities of the library services platforms in prototyping with minimal tweaks from the system vendor. We did this by working in what are called premium sandboxes which are separate test environments of our production systems to implement the ideas that we discussed in project meetings. Pascal, what staff expertise would you say was needed to advise on the various LSP configurations during the project? First of all we needed metadata expertise. We also had an entire metadata committee on this project look at mark fields that could be used to improve description, discovery and access for accessible works. So the metadata experts at both Florida and York University in Ontario that worked on the committee implemented these experimental metadata recommendations in our test environments. We also needed a patron and circulation expert. We set up a separate patron category just for Marrakesh beneficiaries to give them privilege access to accessible works in the library services platform. Once we set up this patron class we also set up a separate collection or location in the LSP for accessible works. One option is to tie the patron category to the collection so that we could tie access to being a confirmed Marrakesh beneficiary at their home campus. A discovery tool configuration expert was really helpful in setting up the configuration for a user interface for discovery and access of these works. There are a lot of options as to how we could approach the web interface for this collection and this expert helped narrow in on the most efficient and simplest approach given our environments. Finally we also had a resource sharing expert for lending and borrowing materials between participating libraries. There are a few options here too from ALMA to ALMA direct connections, ISO, ILL connections and deep linking of catalog views that we had to make some decisions on. There are definitely lots of options and depending on the nature of the library whether it's part of a consortia or an individual library and whether changes can be configured in the individual library area or whether they're in the shared network zone impacts the decisions one makes and one can't make in prototyping. What seemed to work fairly easily in designing these services? If I can answer from the human point of view I would say working with the assembled experts from both US and Canada who were eager to share their ideas worked really well. Also setting up the metadata templates based on mark slash rda recommendations was also pretty straightforward. Daniel what do you think we found challenging in implementing some functional requirements? Well limitations based on existing local consortia agreements and discovery configuration. As for the Florida virtual campus as I said before we are a consortium of 12 universities and 28 colleges with pre-existing collaborative agreements for certain aspects of the system. Working within the constraints of those agreements was one challenging aspect with regard to configuration of the discovery platform. What are some of the outcomes we expect in terms of systems implementation for this project? As far as possible we want to use existing system functionality with minimal vendor requested tweaks. We're also in discussion with other library services platform libraries too both OCLC's WorldCat management services and the open source folio platform. What should other libraries looking to get involved with supporting Marrakesh borrowing and lending think about in terms of their library services platform configuration? Well if you're using something other than Alma and Primo maybe start by reaching out to those libraries using your platform to see if they're also interested in working on a solution for making accessible works more available to the blind and print disabled. You can also get in touch with the task force itself and indicate that you're interested in collaborating with us. How can people learn more about our work? Well they can connect with us on the ARL and Carl websites and we're also publishing many of our presentations to you too. If you would like to contact us via email here's the address which is arl-carl-marrakesh-tf at arl.org. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn about this component of the project.