Report: AHEAD E-Text Institute #3

The E-Text Institute sponsored by the AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group went extremely well. Ron Stewart was, as always, a crowd favorite and he covered the Policies and Procedures portion of the program on Thursday. Most of the two-dozen attendees were aware of what he discussed and the questions posed were right on the money - serving to enhance the presentation. This being my third institute and having seen Ron present before, I could tell he was very comfortable as he kept deviating from the slides but still managed to bring it in on time. Primary topics included:

• What E-text is and is not [file formats]
• Who uses E-text and why
• Where does E-text come from (and how)
• The Laws around E-text [copyright, ADA, 504, 508, various State regulations, Chafee]
• Relevant OCR cases and implementation [what they mean to us]
• Publisher [perspective, rights, responsibilities]
• Policy development and implementation
• Common problems and solutions [not quite 'Best Practices' but in that direction]

One portion of the presentation that has seen growth over the three institutes is the Publisher Perspective. The advent of NIMAS and movement of E-text production into the accommodation mainstream - as well as numerous advances in the ease of production - have gained the attention of the publishers. They are beginning to take a serious look at the commercial viability of E-text along with a broader appreciation of their rights (and responsibilities). In this segment Ron covered:

• Publisher Rights
• Publisher Concerns
• American Association of Publishers position on scanning
• The AAP position on security of digital formats
• Digital Rights Management (DRM)

With rights, of course, comes responsibilities. Ron covered the basics of who is responsible for what [students, faculty, DSS, publishers, institutions, bookstores, etc.] which was followed by policy issues [the need, development, establishing, parties involved, etc.]. Also included was links to and information about various resources - most of which is available on the expanding AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group site.

I sat way in the back so as not to distract [Ron barely picked on me at all] and furiously took fresh notes for when I will be presenting similar information at Landmark College in June. This, however, was the best institute yet and has been streamlined nicely. Ron also told those assembled that by this time next year there would be one training each month rotating around the country and New England would certainly be included. he also alluded to an idea that the Policy and Procedures piece would be expanded to two days as would the Production portion. This way each half could be geared towards separate crowds - the former for administrators and the latter for technologists - with appropriate overlap.

Friday started out very well - more coffee and danish for the masses [Erin reminded us to be careful as our gotten gains could turn ill should anyone spill on a keyboard]. Ron started with an extremely slimmed down version of the Production slides that covered the bare essentials of terminology, scanning with Abbyy Fine Reader, E-Text and Digital File formats, and the parts of a DAISY Talking Book.

I started out my portion by having the class open the sample DAISY book folder on their workstations and going over the parts that comprise a DTB - the various files and formats within the book folder. It is rather like discussing the various files that make up a fully functional website - you've got html, .txt, .mp3, smil, ncc and more. This was followed by stick-time with Dolphin EaseReader. After all - how can folks be expected to build DAISY books if they don't know what they're made of and how they work.

Following lunch in a Babson Dining Hall we set our minds to producing DAISY books using the training module I am currently developing for Boston University. [NOTE: please feel free to take a look at these materials but keep in mind they are a work in progress. They will soon be expanded and moved to a more permanent location.] A brief overview of each portion of the process yielded great feedback from Ron and questions from the participants. I did this in order to head off the inevitable looking-ahead that tends to screw-up those who are supposed to be following along step-by-step and to give the class a feel for the overall process.

It was also here that Ron and I discovered areas where we agree to disagree. My basic process involves removing all pictures and other graphics and replacing them with the captions form the book and a notice for user to refer to their hard copy. The rationale being that in most cases students will own a copy of the book themselves and be able to access such references. The LD, MI, and most LV students can eye-ball the materials and the Blind/LV (severe) students tend to prefer quality captions and descriptions. We also remove these items because of the time and labor involved in building them into the finished DAISY book. Ron's take on this is that publishers will argue that under copyright we must maintain as much of the integrity of the textbook as possible - regardless of procedural constraints. We understand each others argument and, in fact, as my staff continually refines our process we are discovering better and faster techniques which will allow us to include items such as graphics and footnotes and still get the books to the end-users in a reasonable amount of time.

The Boston University training module is broken into five sections [with additional segments in the works]:

1. From .pdf to .doc - we start out our process by scanning into .pdf format. This gives us a digital master to work from. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) we break the large single .pdf into more manageable chunks [typically book chapters].
2. Editing of .doc files - we do not "edit" so much as clean up. No OCR is perfect and we need to pretty much strip out the formatting so that they will best fit into the DAISY production software. We also make certain that the text in the digital files exactly matches the text in the hard copy.
3. Section three has multiple parts and takes users through the Dolphin EasePublisher production software.
4. Here we do quality control and make certain the various files are named correctly and that all is safe and sound.
5. Finally there is information about how we go about delivering the finished product to the student end-user.

For this training we used the files from a book I had done at BU this past semester and concentrated on only a few pages of the first chapter. Out of a dozen-and-a-half attendees actively following along with my instructions [some chose to sit and watch], two-thirds were able to produce a working finished product. Considering this was the first time I had actually used this training module - and given the number of errors I found in the process during the workshop - and not to mention Ron being in the same room - I was delighted with the results.

We followed the hands-on piece with a quick look at Dolphin Producer - the barebones DAISY production tool that works with Microsoft Word. Overall the institute was a fantastic experience and I cannot thank Ron Stewart enough for allowing me the opportunity to take part. And I only got on Ron's nerves a little bit.