Kyle Rimkus
Librarian for Digital Programs and Partnerships
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This briefing will provide an overview of the Educational Materials Made Accessible (EMMA) project, whose goal is to reduce duplication effort in disability service offices at colleges and universities across the United States, and thereby enable faster, better service for those needing accessible learning materials. Specifically, the project seeks to enable broad accessibility of digitized texts to patrons with print disabilities, especially texts that have undergone remediation or improvement, into shared storage and access infrastructure provided by the company Bookshare, with additional deposit agreements and ingest workflows supported by HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE). Supported to date by the Mellon Foundation, the university project partners are George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, The Ohio State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, and Vanderbilt University. The repository partners are ACE/Scholars Portal, Bookshare, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. This briefing will share information about the technologies, workflows, metadata standards, and policies that have resulted from six years of grant development, and how libraries and disability service organizations may participate in EMMA once the project moves out of the grant phase and into a member-supported model.
https://emma.lib.virginia.edu/home/welcome
https://emma.uvacreate.virginia.edu/
Presentation: https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117416