2014-07-16-Audio Books Apps and Assistance
Seminars@Hadley
Audiobooks, Apps and Assistance:
A Library of Possibilities from the
National Library Service
Presented by
Caroline Ashby
Chancey Fleet
Moderated by
Tom Babinski
July 16, 2014
Tom Babinski
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Seminars @ Hadley. Today the title of our seminar is “Audio Books, Apps, and Assistance: A Library of Possibilities from the National Library Service.”
A couple of housekeeping chores: for those of you using access technology some of these following pieces of information may be useful. If you have a connected microphone press and hold the CTRL key to speak. You’ll hear a tone that indicates it’s your turn to speak. When you’re finished speaking please remember to release the microphone.
To type a message to the group press F8, type the text and then press the Enter key. Press F9, that’ll take you to the list of messages. You can arrow through them as you wish and the newest message appears at the bottom of the list. And please keep your typing related to the topic. I’ll be monitoring the typing here and can then relay the questions to the participants.
And we’re always interested in your feedback so when you leave the seminar today there’ll be a very brief survey, and we appreciate it if you can take time to look at that survey and answer the questions.
Today I want to welcome the participants of our seminar. We have three people from the Andrew Heiskelll Braille and Talking Book Library in New York City. First I want to introduce the Chief Librarian, that’s Caroline Ashby. Caroline oversees the distribution of the audio books and Braille materials to people who have visual impairments as well as physical disabilities. She does that on site via downloads and then through an extensive mailing operations to residents of New York City and Long Island.
Secondly we have with us Chancey Fleet. She’s the Library’s Assistive Technology Coordinator and she helps patrons with the National Library Service BARD and other literary resources. She also helps patrons to research, learn and use assistive technology by providing training for beginners, coordinating a team of volunteer peer educators, and guiding patrons to online resources for assistive technology topics.
And lastly we have Jill Rothstein. She’s the Manager of Public Services and Outreach for the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. She has worked in the neighborhood system of the New York City Public Libraries for over nine years and has a background as a child’s librarian and as a member of the Committee Serving Children with Special Needs.
To begin with I’d like to ask Caroline to if she would tell us about who is eligible for the National Library Service and how do they sign up for it? Go ahead.
Caroline Ashby
Great. So the National Library Service is a division of the Library of Congress, so this is a federal program that’s distributed to end users like yourselves through 56 network libraries around the country, of which we are one. And National Library Service services are the same throughout the country no matter where you live, and eligibility rules remain the same.
So folks who are eligible for this service are legally blind or they’re visually impaired to the extent that reading a large print book with your glasses on is uncomfortable or difficult; or you have a physical disability that prevents you from reading print. So that could be arthritis that makes it difficult to turn pages, or Parkinson’s Disease, an amputation, dexterity issues in your hands or wrists – anything that might make it difficult to hold or turn the pages of a book or read comfortably.
And then the fourth way to qualify for our service is to have a reading disability that’s organically based, so a lot of people with dyslexia qualify that way. That type of eligibility needs to be certified by a doctor of medicine but all of the others can be certified by any professional who’s familiar with your condition – that could be a doctor, a social worker, a nurse, a director of therapeutic recreation if you live in an assisted living or rehab center. It could be your local librarian at your public library – just anyone who can make the judgment call that you’re not able to read standard print.
And we really, really want to stress that you do not need to be legally blind to use this service, that most, the vast majority of our patrons are visually impaired and they are transitioning to talking books because large print is no longer comfortable for them.
I’m going to move on and talk a little bit about how you apply for our service. There are applications available online and you sign up at the Library of Congress website, which is probably the easiest way since all of you are coming to us from different locations around the country. So the website is www.loc.gov/nls. And you can look for the application under the “Learn” heading on the main page.
If you’re looking to find out where your nearest library outpost is there’s a “Find a Library” link at the top right. So again, that’s the “Find a Library” link on the NLS website which is www.loc.gov/nls. And we can post all of these links I guess at the end of the program.
Do we have any questions so far or shall I keep going and talk about some of the materials that are available and the equipment we distribute?
Tom Babinski
Does anyone have any questions? This would be a time to do it.
Mylie
Yes, this is Mylie in California and perhaps you’ll be getting to this later, but I wondered what the difference is between what the state libraries do and what the NLS does.
Caroline Ashby
Sure. Depending on what state you live in, NLS service is often delivered via the state library. So for example in upstate New York, out of the New York State Library there’s the New York State Talking Book and Braille Library. So in many cases this is the same exact service that’s provided by your state library. If you want to follow up and let us know what state you’re coming to us from we can go ahead and confirm that.
Caller
With these services, are these the same talking book services that I would be getting in Canada? Because I am coming to you from Monkton in New Brunswick and I was just wondering if the services here in Canada resemble the ones in the States.
Caroline Ashby
That’s a really good question and we’re all sort of looking at each other, not knowing how to answer it. But service in Canada is most certainly different. The National Library Service Talking Book Service is for US citizens. So we can certainly do some research and follow up with you about what’s available to you in Canada.
Darla
My name is Darla Cook and I’m from Oklahoma.
Tom Babinski
Go ahead, Darla, with your question.
Darla
I was trying to find out, I lost my password for BARD and so I had it taped and anyway, the recorder broke, the tape broke so how do I get it back?
Caroline Ashby
We’re going to talk a lot more about BARD as we move along into what products are available and what talking books are available, but if you go to the BARD website there’s a link there for “Forgot your password” and you can reset it there; or call us or call your local NLS network library and they can talk you through it. So we can certainly get back to you.
Tom Babinski
We’ll be taking some more questions in a moment but Caroline, would you like to go ahead and tell us about some more aspects of the National Library Service?
Caroline Ashby
Great, yeah. So the great thing about the National Library Service offerings is that they’re available to you in multiple different ways. So for those of you who don’t have internet access at home, although I guess all of you do since you’re participating in this, we mail all of our materials to patrons. So it’s a really extensive books-by-mail service with an easy to use player that is also provided by the library. So in addition to offering you the talking books and Braille books if you use those we also distribute players to patrons. So you don’t need to have your own CD player or your own mp3 player or your own anything to use this service.
The cartridges are also easy to return. So all of our digital talking books come on a flash drive that’s in a bigger container about the size of a cassette, and to return it, it comes in a plastic container and all you have to do is flip over the mailing card. So you flip over the mailing card; there’s no postage required. We send it out to you with a special postage rate called free matter for the blind and you send it back to us that way, too. So there’s no cost to you – the materials are literally delivered right to your mailbox and can come back to us from there.
There are also a whole number of ways to choose which books you want. So you’re always welcome to call your local network library and talk to a reader advisor there about what you’d like to read next. We have an online public access catalog where you can log in as yourself and choose books that you want, and select them to be sent to you automatically. There’s also a magazine that’s sent to you every couple of months called Talking Book Topics and that comes from the National Library Service directly with all of the new books that we’ll be getting in the next couple of months.
So it’s usually 150 titles or so and comes with an order form in the back, and you can go through the list and see what sounds interesting to you; check off the ones that you like and mail that order form back to us, or fax it to us or email it back to us. So you can place your order in whichever communication means is most comfortable for you – by mail, by phone, by fax, by email, even over our Facebook page we get requests.
And then the other way to get service from us is a really unique library offering called Auto-Select Service, and patrons can tell us their preferences for books. So they can give us a list of their favorite authors – you like Danielle Steele and John Grisham and you do not like female narrators and you do not like long books and you want no sex and no violence, and we can plug in all of these factors into your profile and match books to you automatically. And you can tell us how often you want books: “I want five books a month,” or “I always want ten books at a time so when I return one send one to replace it.” And the whole service can be automatic like that, sort of like your Netflix if any of you have or are subscribing to Netflix for DVDs.
And finally let me tell you a little bit about the quality and the scope of the collection. Right now there are over 30,000 talking book titles. They’re all narrated by humans, professional narrators, not volunteers. And it’s a collection that’s meant to mimic the scope of a small- to medium-sized public library collection. So you’re going to find all of your best-sellers, some non-fiction, a lot of biographies, a lot of mysteries and romances and sci-fi.
What you’re not going to find is really heavy educational and scholarly material. So it’s not meant to be a college library; it’s not meant to help you with your research paper necessarily. This is meant as a recreational and a collection for entertainment. You’ll certainly find all of the classics in it though.
In addition to books we have about 40 magazine titles available including People, Sports Illustrated, Consumer Reports, Health & Wellness, newsletters – and those too can be delivered right to your home on a digital cartridge.
And then for all of you, since you’re so computer savvy, what you’re probably going to be interested in is our BARD Braille and Audio Reading Download service. And this is a totally online download service for both talking books and Braille books if you’re Braille readers, and there are 50,000 titles available on BARD.
And it’s a totally different eBook model than the one you’ll find in most public libraries. You can download any of those 50,000 books anytime you want no matter how many other people have them at the same time, so there’s an unlimited number of users able to download the same book at the same time. There’s also no due date on them so you can download the book and keep it forever. Most public library eBooks right now, you download them and there’s a 14- or 21-day loan period and then the file, you know, just spontaneously combusts and disappears from your device. But not so with the BARD materials.
And so this is a really great free option for getting your books immediately. You don’t have to wait for them to come in the mail. You don’t have to talk to a reader advisor. If you already know what you want you just log into the website and download the files. If you’re using BARD on a computer you transfer the files onto a flash drive and then plug that flash drive into the player that we provide to you.
Or there’s a free BARD mobile app called BARD Mobile. It’s available in the Apple App Store and it does exactly what the BARD website does. All of the 50,000 books are available there – the difference is you can also play them back on the app. So you can find the book you want, download it to your device and listen on your device. So this is a really sort of revolutionary service for us to be offering and we just launched that app last September.
This sounds like it might be a good time to pause and see if there are any questions about the collection and what’s available and how to use the service.
Tom Babinski
I have a couple of questions that were written in. One of them is “If you want a book from BARD that is not in the collection can the National Library Service try to get that book?