Victoria Owen
Information Policy Scholar-Practitioner & Visiting ARL-CARL Visiting Program Officer for Marrakesh Treaty Implementation
University of Toronto
Bill Kasdorf
Principal
Kasdorf & Associates, LLC
Stephen Downie
Associate Dean & Professor
University of Illinois
Pascal Calarco
University of Windsor
John Unsworth
University of Virginia
Katherine Klosek
Association of Research Libraries
It is estimated that only 7% of published books are available in an accessible format. This session will present work on two projects that aim to address this injustice. In the first project, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) are working on the design and implementation of a pilot between academic research libraries in the US and Canada to digitize, describe, discover and deliver accessible texts to the print disabled. The pilot partners are Cornell University, Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ), the University of Florida and York University. The second project describes FRAME (Federated Repositories of Accessible Material for Education), an infrastructure project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (and, earlier, by the Institute for Museum and Library Services). The purpose of this project and the infrastructure we are creating is to reduce the duplication of effort in disability service offices at colleges and universities and thereby to enable faster, better service for those needing accessible learning materials. The university partners on this project are George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin. The repository partners are Bookshare, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive; the EMMA repository at the University of Virginia is the access point and hub. Next year, we plan to add the Ontario Council of University Libraries’ Accessible Content E-Portal to the list of repository partners, thereby test-driving the Marrakesh Treaty, about which there will be more from our Canadian friends.
http:/emma.lib.virginia.edu/
https://www.arl.org/news/arl-and-carl-form-joint-task-force-on-marrakesh-treaty-implementation/