 Hello everyone. My name is Kyle Remkes. I'm going to get started so people want to sit down and see if people are still filtering in but just introduce myself. I am a librarian for digital programs and partnerships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If you want to follow along on my slides, I've uploaded them to our institutional repository so the links are there. But I'd like to start by just remembering back to 2014 when Hottie Trust weathered their lawsuit brought against them by the author's guild and just the feeling of joy and pride that so many of us in this community felt and feeling that our professional values have been vindicated and one really interesting thing about that lawsuit was that the National Federation for the Blind had joined Hottie Trust as a co-defendant which certainly had something to do with some of the wording that came out in the court finding to the effect of digitization with the goal of making works accessible to the print disabled is protected under fair use. I think that made us feel even better about ourselves, look at all that we're doing for the blind, people with visual disabilities. But how much had we actually done at that point? Hottie Trust does have a feature for people with registered print disabilities to go in and request access to PDFs. There are similar things in the similar feature in Internet Archive. There are other people doing work in this space like Bookshare. So there has been a lot of good work done in the repository space for this, but to my mind that court finding was not so much an endorsement of work we had already done. So much is an endorsement of work that we had the potential to do and that we should do and the project I'm going to be talking about today. I think is taking an earnest step into that direction. So it's called Educational Materials Made Accessible or EMA and it is a repository that is built to be used primarily by people who work in disability services offices at colleges and universities. So if you're in a position in one of these offices and you prepare texts for the needs of users with print disabilities via digitization or mediation, you can deposit them into the EMA repository where they can be discovered by people from working at other DSOs. DSO is kind of the acronym that we've been using for these disability service organizations. So in that deposit we're envisioning will occur with the aid of librarians to ensure good metadata. EMA is also a place that can serve as a single location to search across multiple repositories that house remediated texts. So Bookshare, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and the ACE Portal. And if the DSO officer downloads something from EMA that comes from one of these repositories and further remediates it for a particular user's special needs, that can be deposited back into EMA and as a variant version to the originating repository. So where do people with how do print disabled users acquire academic texts in the first place? Angelina Zaitsev at HathiTrust has created this graphic which I think is really useful. So they have a number of options. It's not just a single place that they can go. They can purchase a text on the open market via Kindle or as an audiobook through Audible, something like that. They can find a copy on an open access website like Project Gutenberg. This is primarily texts that are in the public domain. They can borrow a text from their library. Good luck making sure that it's in the format that they need, but they can do that. They can sign up for the National Service like Bookshare or the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. Or they can contact their campus disability services if they're on a university or college campus and people who work there will try to procure accessible texts on their behalf by contacting publishers to try to get an accessible version by going through that HathiTrust backdoor feature or using this new service that is being rolled out. This quadrant down there is where we're really trying to make the most impact with this project. It has its roots in a white paper that came out of an IMLS research paper in 2017 called Libraries Take Aim and this white paper issued a call to action to libraries to become more involved in this space. It found that the challenges that DSOs face are very costly that they're replicated across multiple universities and that the skills that we have in libraries can be useful here because a lot of the work being done involves digitization, metadata, file storage, things like that. There's also an awful lot of duplication of effort occurring in this space. Apparently two-thirds of what gets uploaded by instructors into Blackboard is duplicative. So it stands to reason that of all the texts that students are requesting, students with print disabilities, that there's a good chance that if they're requesting it from my university they could be requesting it from yours as well and that people in our DSOs are having to try and figure out how to make those texts accessible again and again. This IMLS grant was followed on by two rounds of implementation funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant was called Frame or Federating Repositories of Accessible Learning Materials for Higher Education. It was led out of the University of Virginia with John Unsworth as the PI and the technology for this system is kind of an amalgam of kind of custom built things at the University of Virginia with the software from the Bookshare platform. So Bookshare is the lead repository on this. They are focused on accessible materials but Internet Archive, Hottie Trust and the ACE portal also figure into this infrastructure and there have been several university library partners working on this as well. And in my own role at the University of Illinois, I've been active in both rounds of the grant advising on metadata, testing out ingest tools as they're developed and also trying to set up a workflow with our own DSO on campus to try and advise on what that would look like for other universities who might join on as members. So at Illinois we have a pretty robust digitization program. We digitize via Google Books. We have an Internet Archive scanning center in our library. We have our own digitization studio and work with vendors. We try to funnel as much as we can into Hottie Trust. That's kind of a strategic decision that we've made. Now several blocks away on campus is our Disability Resources and Educational Services Unit or DRES. And they do digitization too but if I may generalize, I would say that the digitization work they do, which is primarily with the goal of providing readers with texts they can use with screen readers, tends to be very different from what we do in libraries. So again, generalizing when it comes to urgency, we don't always have deadlines in libraries when it comes to our big digitization projects but if a student is requesting a text from a DSO, it's generally because they need it now. They need it this coming semester or best case scenario because it's on a reading list in the upcoming semester. When it comes to copyright, we librarians like to work through things that are in the public domain but most of what's being requested in DSOs is, you know, it's newly published materials. It's protected by copyright. Both of us run digitized works through OCR software. In libraries we do it to create good searchable transcripts but very rarely do we actually go in and correct the OCR. But in our DSOs, the students do need clean and accurate transcripts so DSO staff are going in and correcting OCR and oftentimes enriching it. This is what I mean when I use the term remediation by adding things like alt text for images, for mathematical formulas, for chemistry notation, for tables. They're adding structure, they're adding structured headings, structured tables of contents and things like that. Now in terms of access, we generally deposit into open access repositories in libraries when we can but our DSOs have not had that as an option. They've tended to manage access locally on a per user basis and even at times there have been people who have reported feeling that they're afraid that holding on to these files could constitute some sort of legal liability and they delete them at the end of every year. This is because there are a lot of misconceptions about the law in this space. I think that the best place to go to really dispel those misconceptions is a report that came out of the first round of the frame grant called The Law and Accessible Texts by Brandon Butler, Prue Adler and Krista Cox. It really gives a great overview of everything that's at play in this area and they teach us in this report that we have a hierarchy of laws in the United States that really argues in favor of us being able to do this sort of work. So on the first level there's the first amendment which offers wide protections of speech which tapers down to disability and civil rights law which vindicates the first amendment and then copyright law which yields to disability and civil rights interests were appropriate. Now in terms of disability law we're primarily concerned with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which mandates the elimination of discrimination on the basis of disability meaning that we're not so much breaking the law and we're doing this work so much as complying with the law and this is further refined by copyright law such and such things as the chaffee amendment, the fair use provision and the precedent set by the author's guild versus Hottie trust case. When you take it all together each step in the workflow is protected by the law when it comes to request anyone with a disability that inhibits them from using traditional print or electronic formats may request an accessible version and it turns out that that person doesn't need to buy it the DSO doesn't need to buy a copy the library doesn't need to buy a copy it's a common misconception that someone needs to actually pay for a copy of that addition but they don't actually have to. Remediation is unproblematic from a copyright standpoint the Supreme Court has acknowledged that it falls under fair use. Delivery is also unproblematic so once an accessible copy has been created it can be delivered to the person who has that need and in whatever format is appropriate to that person's use. We don't need to put any kind of draconian technological protection measures on them like I don't know watermarks or digital fingerprinting technology or issuing burn after reading notices like none of that is actually required by the law but when it comes to retaining and sharing these works we do need to be responsible so there is a lot a line of fair use case law that supports creating a database of in copyright works as long as it is meant to support legitimate fair use and that's what Emma is doing I would emphasize that these texts are not just being published out into the open for everyone to use the people who can use Emma are people who work for a disability services office that they're authenticated registered users and they're doing their work on behalf of students generally who have a registered print disability with their campus so a lot of caution has been taken to ensure these aspects. In addition to the US law that I mentioned the US is also a signatory with 87 other countries to the Marrakesh Treaty which is an international agreement to make the production and transfer of remediated texts for people with blindness or visual impairments easier by reducing the limitations and establishing certain exceptions to copyright law internationally so that's a even greener green light for us to be able to do this work and to do it potentially on an international scale. Now I would emphasize that this work is not necessarily hostile to the publishing industry rather it seeks to correct a gap in their current model. Publishers who take an accessible first approach to their work tend to be very easy for our DSOs to work with and it's only because not enough of them do that we have to do this very time-consuming expensive at times tedious work of digitization or mediation so really what we're doing is filling a gap in their model by building all this infrastructure that we've built for this project. Now if you join on to this as a member of Emma now Emma's I think the folks at UVA said that they're hoping to roll out a membership model later this year in July I believe but if you sign on your library is going to have to get to know your DSO to build a workflow to throw depositing texts into the system and there's going to have to be getting to know one another and I can guarantee that one DSO does things very differently from another across across the board at all of our institutions but some of the things that you would have to talk about are things like file formats. What file formats is your DSO creating? Are you creating Braille files? Daisy files which is a variant of EPUB, Microsoft Word, PDF. This is going to differ from place to place but also sometimes from semester to semester based on the needs of particular students and what hardware and software they like to use. We'll have to know how they're keeping track of bibliographic metadata for the items that they're remediating so that when we do an upload at the end of whenever we do them every semester we know we're getting good metadata. Fortunately the system has a nice feature that you can use an ISBN to query Worldcat and Googlebooks and bring in good metadata so we don't have to necessarily rekey everything but we need to have a workflow in place that that can enable us to find that metadata. The system also requires metadata about remediation actions and this is important in the end user interface when it comes to search because if you can see on some of these little screen grabs the search interface allows you to scope on different accessibility features and formats. So if you have a user who has a particular need you can search by to see whether you can find files that have been remediated that actually already meet those needs and you have to make certain decisions like how often is this deposit happening? Is it happening on a rolling basis? Is it occurring at the end of every year? Is it happening at the end of every semester? And who's actually doing the submission? Who's pushing the button? Are there legacy items? Is there a hard drive under a desk somewhere with 10 years of work focused on this on doing this that we could build a retrospective project to address? So our workflow that we've established at our library is one where Dres will track the items that they're doing throughout the semester in a spreadsheet by ISBN. They're storing their remediated files in a cloud storage shared folder and at the end of the semester they're uploading them to Emma utilizing that bibliographic lookup feature. Now we in the library will advise on any metadata problems that may arise and we're going to be working with them iteratively over the years to streamline their workflow because the workflow tools keep changing and improving from the developers. We hope to get to a place where they can initiate the workflow by starting an upload and the librarians can be the approvers. The system doesn't quite do that yet but I think it might be coming. So if I could summarize, the primary use case for Emma is it's meant to be used for DSO officers who can search across multiple repositories to find texts that their students may need. They can follow a download link to an item that they discover if they further remediate a file they can upload it back to Emma and that variant version will go back to its home repository and if they're preparing something that does not exist yet in any of those repositories they can deposit it with good metadata directly into Emma where people at other DSOs can discover it. Membership for Emma is slated to open up in mid 2023. I think the folks at UVA who are coordinating this have said that they're targeting July but I'm not sure if that's the case but if you're interested in possibly joining the email address is emma4accessibility at virginia.edu. They're the people to contact not myself. Now Emma is going to ask for libraries to partner with the disability services offices on their campus in this membership to kind of go through the process that I told you about of learning how they do things and work and developing a deposit workflow but they're not planning to ask libraries to pay for it at least not first and foremost they want to target the offices where disability services report which could be different very different from one institution to another it could be the office of the provost, vice president or the office of student affairs. I was talking to someone this morning who said that their DSO is based out of IT so there's going to be a lot of variance here but membership dues will be used to sustain and develop the Emma service. So if I could conclude on a personal note I would say this project has been very inspiring for me to work on in part because sometimes I can be kind of critical of how we do things in libraries when it comes to building partnerships or you know funding money into certain I don't know software projects that might not succeed but being in a room with people at these who work in disability services first of all they're doing like really phenomenal work but it's very clear that they just don't have the same type of culture of collaboration and national coordination that we have in libraries so in this project we were really able to bring kind of these librarian superpowers to the table when it comes to all the work we've done over the years in library catalog automation and building repositories and having a very principled understanding of the law so you know with all that taken together the project has really been inspiring for me and I hope that maybe it will inspire some of you to join on as members as well so thank you very much and I left time for questions. Hi Kyle thanks for that great presentation I've been working as part of the ARL Carl Marrakesh Treaty Implementation a sister project to this one and it seems like one of the hard parts about this is the ensuring that the person the requester is actually a legitimate print disabled person and I'd be interested in how you folks have thought of that and what your approach is thanks sure so the approach is for all of this to be mediated through a disability services office there has been some discussion of whether the system could be opened eventually to registered users but I think the technical decision that they made and probably political decision that has been made at this point has been that the system is primarily used for people who work on behalf of users with print of the print disabled so that's the that's the approach that they're taking so far on the project but maybe it could end up developing in the direction that you're suggesting but right now it's not built for that. Hi Kyle I'm Charles Watkinson I'm from University of Michigan but I'm asking this question as the president of the Association of University Presses this year so Emma is an awesome project and we you know I followed it from the beginning and of course University Presses are contributing through bookshare yes I'm born accessible content but one of the problems we're facing is the 2025 deadline coming in Europe for the all ebooks essentially to be published in accessible forms as we nearly market them and the costs of remediation are very very substantial for us. Do you see any potential for the remediated copies in Emma to potentially be accessible to the University Presses who publish them originally so as to be able to sort of have a feedback loop into what the Presses can do especially if the University Press is part of a member library. Well I guess I wonder are you talking about your backlog of things you published in the past or things you're publishing the future because backlog okay yeah I mean in the future hopefully you know your process is digital and a lot of what you're doing what we end up in DSO's people end up doing is kind of recreating some of the work that you've done already in digital type setting if you want to call it that so I suppose that that could be something that you could rely on but I wouldn't say that anyone is going to digitize your entire back catalog for you so but that unless you wanted to set that up as a project with I don't know your library and propose to them that that could be a project to tackle I mean I could see that being something that you could maybe try to request centralized funds to to support perhaps but the the copies that are already in Emma yes doing a search saying University Michigan Press would it be possible for the University Press to pull those out and incorporate it in its own products? Uh I'm not sure I'm not sure what if you could you pull them out to incorporate in your own products that would be something that you would probably have to ask maybe some of the folks on the administrative side of Emma I'm not I'm just not certain about that but good question yeah all right seeing no more questions thank you very much for your attention appreciate it