From Ron Stewart - Chair AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group

On Monday December 5th, AHEAD hosted a meeting of the representatives of many of the major stakeholder groups involved in the curricular accessibility discussion at the AAP (Association of American Publishers) offices in New York City. This day long solutions oriented, meeting sought pragmatic solutions and provided for an opportunity to move the process forward on developing a comprehensive [pragmatic] solution around the issue of access to curricular materials for postsecondary students with disabilities. Documents pertaining to this meeting have been added to the AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group website.

Identified areas of discussion included:

1. Contacting and obtaining materials for the great number of publishers is currently and inefficient and ineffective process. A centralized system needs to be developed to minimize the points for making a request and obtaining the needed curricular materials.
2. Clear and reasonable expectations need to be developed between the various entities involved in e-text provision as to what are reasonable timelines from requesting materials and receiving those materials in a form that can be easily converted based on the needs of the individual student.
3. A great level of commonality exists in the two year schools and lower level classes at the four year school on the textbooks commonly used in the courses offered. An ability to share materials between schools and systems would be very beneficial to the process and would result in more efficient resource utilization within the campuses.
4. A common understanding needs to be developed as to the process that is used in Disability Service offices to determine student’s qualifications for the appropriate use of e-text materials and those students who would typically be determined to be eligible to use e-text materials.
5. Guidelines need to be mutually developed for the creating of alt format materials when the materials can not be obtained from the publisher in a timeframe suitable to meet the needs of the student with a print related disability.
6. Currently the materials that are being provided by the publishers are of marginal quality, and a great deal of effort has to be made to convert these materials to a form usable by the students. Often times it is more efficient and the final product is of a higher quality when the postsecondary institution produces the materials in-house.
7. A working group needs to be developed to formulate solutions to the current immediate problems of availability and quality of the materials being provided by the publishers. A second group need to focus on the longer term issues of the format of materials provided, centralizing provision, and moving all parties to a common digital format for e-text materials.
8. Awareness and training activities related to the acquisition, production, control and dissemination of electronic curricular materials is very lacking amongst all participant in this area, effective and mutually agreeable education and awareness activities need to be developed and delivered across the entire spectrum of organizations involved in curricular access.

The following documents also servered as a basis for the meeting or are helpful in gaining insight into the perspectives of the various parties present.

• Implimentation Guidelines for New York State's Chapter 219
• Copyright Issues – AAP Position Paper Presented At AHEAD 2004

Meanwhile - down in DC:

ASSOCIATIONS DISTRIBUTE COPYRIGHT POLICY GUIDE TO CAMPUSES

Washington, DC, December 6, 2005: Organizations representing higher education, research libraries, and publishers today encouraged colleges and universities across the nation to review their policies for complying with copyright law to ensure they are in line with recent legal and technological developments.

To help institutions carry out such reviews, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) have written and distributed Campus Copyright Rights & Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations [.pdf download]. The document is intended to present a clear summary of copyright issues in the higher education setting that reflects university and college concerns as well as those of the publishing industry, with which they routinely interact. It has been endorsed by the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Authors Guild.