ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 57| June 2002
Progress on Disabilities Forum Recommendations—National Library Action to Date
On 8 March this year the National Library hosted a forum on Library Services for People with Disabilities. The Forum aimed to promote and improve services provided by all kinds of library and information agencies to people with disabilities. The National Library has made progress on a number of recommendations from the Forum. Details on the progress of two of these recommendations is as follows:
Recommendation: That the National Library of Australia continue to promote the addition of records for materials in alternative formats to the National Bibliographic Database, and encourage the appropriate identification of such materials in library catalogues throughout Australia.
Kinetica provides a rich resource for the discovery and sharing of library resources for people with disabilities and is used regularly to locate material held in over 1100 Australian libraries and overseas libraries. The core of Kinetica is the National Bibliographic Database (NBD), which records the location and details of over 32 million items. Currently 36 organisations contribute records for disability materials to the NBD and the NBD contains over 81 000 records describing library materials in print format alternatives that have been produced for people with disabilities.
KineticaWeb provides a user-friendly interface for searching the National Bibliographic Database. Its search functionality makes it easy for people with disabilities to find materials, for example the use of keyword searches with the addition of Subject Keyword (SW) = large print or Title Keyword = Braille provides an easy way to locate material in these formats. To support this search functionality libraries that contribute cataloguing to the NBD are encouraged to provide text such as braille, talking books, large print books or films for the hearing impaired in the records title or subject fields. These fields are then indexed to enable easy and accurate retrieval.
Kinetica has sought to ensure that the KineticaWeb interface is accessible for people with visual disabilities. The current version of the interface has been evaluated and changes made to improve accessibility. A new version of KineticaWeb is currently being tested, the accessibility of which has been successfully evaluated using the Wave (www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/)
The new KineticaWeb Input interface, which was introduced in October 2001, allows small libraries to add simple MARC records to the NBD via an easy to use input form. This new interface was especially created for libraries that produce a relatively small number of original bibliographic records. The Web Input form gives these libraries the option of creating simple bibliographic records, including holdings. By so doing they are able to contribute their unique records to the NBD. The requirements of smaller organisations that are cataloguing alternative format resources were especially considered in the design of this service.
Works-in-progress (WIP) records are regularly added to the NBD by the producers of materials for people with disabilities. As this type of material has a long production cycle, organisations may add a WIP record to the NBD to signal their intent to create a braille or talking book item. This in turn helps to prevent duplication of effort and assists producers with their funding bids.
Kinetica continues to input data for a small number of libraries who to date have been unable to input their records directly.
For more information please visit our web site at www.nla.gov.au/kinetica
Recommendation: That the National Library of Australia work with Vision Australia to scope a pilot project to test the feasibility of receiving publications in Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) format.
The Library has accepted this recommendation, and will work with Vision Australia on a scoping study for a project to test the feasibility of acquiring, storing and processing XML files created by a small number of participating publishers.
In the United States, the draft Instructional Materials Accessibility Act 2001:
An important recent development is the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) standard, which provides for the production of digital talking books comprising text marked up in XML and spoken audio. The text can be used for navigation and the audio reading commenced at points corresponding to headings and other elements of the text. The most feature-rich DAISY books are multimedia documents, full text and full audio; but many DAISY books are audio without text or conversely text without audio.
Software such as Duxbury can translate an XML text file into braille, meaning multiple formats can be produced from a single text file, which has been suitably marked up in XML.
The first step in the scoping study would be to identify Australian publishers who would be willing to participate in a pilot project, and who possess the capability of producing authoritative versions of their publications in XML format.
The National Library continues to address the goals set down in the recommendations
endorsed by the Forum and future reports will be given as progress is achieved.
—Cheryl Brickell and Warwick Cathro
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au