If you don’t already know about it,
Biblio Vault
is the home page for a service offering books that have been published by scholarly presses. The home page has a searchable database with more than 14,000 titles which academic and university presses have published. The user’s search can be narrowed by author, title, or ISBN.
What makes this a good tool for the disability services professionals is that the home page includes a specific message to disability officers, informing them that they are able to provide accessible formats of many of their documents, which students can then access using assistive technology. Producing these accessible documents and making them available to students with print disabilities is one of the services Biblio Vault offers to participating presses.
An additional benchmark is the site’s offer to make their services --including scanning, printing, and conversion-- available to publishers which, in turn, should help grow the collection of accessible scholarly publications.
This is not a new site. Biblio Vault has been in place since 2001, when it was started by the University of Chicago Press, and now serves more than 50 university presses.
The key for the site’s success is awareness of its presence. This begins with you being aware of it. Now that you are, utilize it and share it with your students. Also, if you are at a school that has a scholarly press, share this resource with them and emphasize to them the accessibility that comes with this kind of service.
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1 comment:
This is really good to know about. Being able to access reading materials in the face of accessibility issues encourages people to push past their difficulties.
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