Assistive Media - magazine audio library

When I said in my introduction that I'm not a librarian, I should at least make some small claim of running an online library of my own.

Assistive Media is a collection of audio recordings in short formats (typically 15-60 minutes) of magazine articles from periodicals like The New Yorker, Harpers, Scientific American, and others. Our services are aimed at the visually impaired who would not otherwise have access to these materials through national library for the blind services. David Henry Erdody is the founder. We just released a new site design, which uses Movable Type as its underpinnings, which provides a podcast feed for the site also available in iTunes of new materials. (Thanks to Brian Kerr for that work, which was done as a project for the University of Michigan School of Information.)

The materials are recorded by volunteers, edited by a small team of work study and volunteer recording engineers, and produced and published to a web site. Everything is available free of charge to listeners. The money we raise goes to the overhead of the hosting and the student audio production, and our goal is to get a very small recording studio of our own which would redouble the amount of audio that we could record and edit.

As the collection grows (we're around 500 titles right now) it's starting to feel a lot more like a set of skills and approaches to media cataloging and what I think of as library skills need to come into play. How do you arrange titles so that people can find them? What sort of indexing and cataloging are helpful so that people can locate materials by browsing or by Googling the collection? And of course since the primary audience are people of low vision, there are a ton of questions that I don't have ready first hand experience with on accessibility.

I would love to figure out what I could do (as a publisher and as an online library) to get our collection more widely used. What do I need to provide to public libraries around the world to let them know about the service? What special things can I provide to libraries for the blind and visually impaired that would allow them to tell their patrons about the services? Are traditional libraries even the best way to promote these sorts of services, or should we aim more directly at other media outlets to get the word out?

Comments

[Lynn]

Hi Ed,

I'm a librarian up in Canada (though I used to work in Texas) and I love both your blog and your Assistive Media site. MFPOW in Texas probably wouldn't have been able to do too much with your site other than link to it because we were small and didn't have much of an outreach program.

However, the Outreach Services librarian at my current place of work also loves your site and is doing a lot to promote it to her patrons who have visual reading impairments.

So... I would say that some traditional libraries may not be able to get the word out - but ones that have outreach services can certainly do so! Good luck with your project.

[DisEdLibrarian]

I've forwarded your site to our Center for Adaptive Technology. Besides being a resource for students with various impairments on campus, they also train teachers who will be working with disabled students. Getting on the resource lists for those teaching the teachers could be an excellent way of promoting your site. Good luck!

[Rolf - Audio Books Fan]

Whoww, what a great service. I'm running an audio book store that has a few free audio books ready for download. It's BBC Comedy, Childrens aduio books and short stories.
Feel free to offer this to your visitors too:

Free audiobook