For the last fourteen years, Jane Vincent has worked for the Center for Accessible Technology providing consultation to libraries on assistive technology acquisition and use throughout California, as well as evaluating Web site accessibility for businesses and organizations and performing assistive technology evaluations for individuals. She recently turned her expertise to writing Implementing Cost-Effective Assistive Computer Technology: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians®, newly published this October. Here, Jane dispels some of the fictions surrounding assistive technology and shares her thoughts on how to implement assistive technology in libraries successfully.

· Assistive technology is usually thought of as equipment specifically for people with disabilities. Do you think this is accurate?

Not at all! I often say that assistive technology exists not because people have disabilities, but because computers are badly designed. Take the standard keyboard—the key markings usually take up about a fourth of the available space, instead of using large print that would make the keys easier to read by elders, children, and others. Inexpensive stick-on labels can greatly improve keyboard legibility. Another example is software that reads text aloud, which is a powerful tool for blind people and people with learning disabilities, but can also be helpful to beginning readers, ESL students, and anyone whose eyes are too tired for proofreading. And so on.

That said, many libraries will likely need to implement policies to ensure that the people who most need assistive technology to use computers will have priority access. Among several checklists and guides in the book is a series of questions to work through in setting policy guidelines relevant to the specific needs of your library. This will give staff a clear way to address issues such as when one patron might legitimately have a priority claim to a specific workstation over another, and when it would be appropriate to allow someone with a disability to reserve a computer for two hours instead of one.

· Libraries have sometimes seen “cost-effective” and “assistive technology” as being mutually incompatible. What’s the most important thing libraries can do to stretch their funds?

The best way — as with any service the library implements — is to find out and respond to the needs and preferences of the community. This can be done by conducting surveys and interviews with community members — patrons, of course, but also members of local organizations who provide services to people with disabilities, and other interested groups; in fact, developing an ongoing  partnership with these organizations can have a great deal of mutual benefit. Once you know what will be most relevant to your patrons, you can acquire and implement technology that will have the largest likelihood of being used regularly, rather than trying to guess what will work and ending up with equipment that just gets dusty.

Note that “cost-effective” doesn’t automatically equal “free.”  For example, there are many good assistive utilities already built into Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but even these have some cost.

At a minimum, they will probably require a discussion with IT staff to ensure that there is a way to provide access to them without compromising the integrity of security systems already on the computers. You’ll also need to check whether the assistive technologies you’re considering will work with your login system, databases, and mainstream applications. The book covers strategies for addressing these and other “hidden” issues.

· Once the technology is in place, how do you let patrons know it’s available?

You’ll want to use your usual channels, such as newsletters and Web sites, to reach not only your target audience, but also their friends, family members, and other supporters who can pass the word along. This is also a good example of why having partner organizations can help; these groups will have proven ways to reach their own memberships with your messages.

Before the patrons start coming, you also want to make sure your staff has had an appropriate level of training. They don’t need to know all the details of using the assistive technology, but they do need an overview of what the library has implemented and what it’s used for, along with an awareness of disability etiquette and how to refer people to patrons to services that the library can’t provide. The book includes several interviews with librarians about how they implemented assistive technology, and I’m particularly pleased with the one from the Ann Arbor District Library, where I had talked to several staff members at random, each of whom had obviously been well-trained in the assistive computer services that the library was newly providing.

· You’re maintaining a blog (at www.janevincent.com/iceact) to accompany the book. What’s the most exciting thing you’ve written about?

I’d have to say the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), which is working to create an entirely new model of assistive technology provision. Today, assistive technology in libraries is installed on individual computers, or maybe on a network; users often need to wait for specific computers to become available, and may then need to spend precious time reconfiguring settings to their preferences. In the future, with GPII, users will configure their preferences one time, and then by entering a code they can have their assistive technology come up fully configured to their needs. It will work from any Internet-connected device — not just computers, but also mobile devices, kiosks, and so on. I presented on GPII at the ALA conference in New Orleans, and was gratified to see the overwhelmingly positive response from librarians. The project’s website is www.gpii.org.

Feel free to contact Jane with your own questions—her email is jane [at] janevincent.com. Learn more about Implementing Cost-Effective Assistive Computer Technology: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians® on the book’s Web page.

Comments Off

Laurie Thompson, MLS, AHIP, brought over 30 years of health science library experience to her role as Editor-in-Chief of The Medical Library Association’s Master Guide to Authoritative Information Resources in the Health Sciences. She is the Assistant Vice President for Library Services at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and is active in the Medical Library Association, serving on its Board of Directors from 2006-2010. We asked Laurie to speak to us in the wake of a great review from CHOICE Magazine, which called the volume she edited “an important, useful tool that is both concise and reliable.” Here she explains how a discussion at an MLA Books Panel meeting turned into this comprehensive resource for health science librarians who must differentiate and select from among the  many resources available.

•  Why did you feel the need to create such a resource?

Comments Off

Reference services are changing rapidly and dramatically. Marie L. Radford, the recent recipient of a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study and improve virtual reference services, edits an invaluable collection exploring the dramatic changes in reference services occurring today and in the future. Leading the Reference Renaissance: Today’s Ideas for Tomorrow’s Cutting-Edge Services, features research, ideas, and methods from leaders in the field. From the press release:

“Bold transformations and visionary ideas characterize the current “renaissance” in  reference services, with still more dramatic changes to come. How can busy professionals stay abreast of the latest models of best practice and new evidence-based research? Award-winning editor and reference visionary Marie L. Radford brings together all of the essentials in her latest collection, Leading the Reference Renaissance: Today’s Ideas for Tomorrow’s Cutting-Edge Services, which Neal-Schuman will publish on December 30, 2011. “

Click here to find out more about this and other titles in Neal-Schuman’s press release database.

Comments Off

Would you be able to find and purchase appropriate gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning young adult fiction if a community member donated money to help your library expand that collection? How would you know what was appropriate? Delivering great GLBT young adult fiction through your collection development plan means you will almost certainly need to justify their inclusion on the bookshelf. Fortunately, there are best practices to help you learn if there is a need for such a collection in the first place.

Today’s How-To-Do-It Tip comes from Serving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Teens: A How-To-Do-It Manual written by Hillias J. Martin and James R. Murdock

Librarians are no strangers to fighting for equity of service for teens. Even today, many public libraries lack YA specialists and separate YA collections—this, despite the arrival of “echo boomers,” children of the baby boom generation who are themselves a demographic juggernaut. Inadequate service is especially unfortunate given that echo boomers are big readers, albeit at the same time as they text friends on their cell phones, download MP3s, and play video games. Publishers recognize this generation’s clout. So do booksellers, such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, which now prominently feature teen-only areas. But many libraries, given limited budgets, struggle to compete.

One way to calculate a rough estimate of how many queer teens live in your community is to visit the U.S. Census Bureau’s home page, www.census.gov, and find data tables for your town. You will need to drill down a bit, but eventually you should find a chart of age groups in your community. Add up the number of teenagers and multiply that result by 0.055—the product will be your rough estimate for how many queer teenagers live near you.

If you live in a small town and after doing this exercise discover that there are fewer than 100 queer teens out there, does that matter? No. The point of this exercise isn’t to compare numbers, or to value the needs of 100 teens less than the needs of 10,000 teens. The purpose is solely to show that there are queer teens in your town. For further proof, check out the yellow pages or go online to see if there are any queer community groups nearby. If there’s a PFLAG chapter or something similar, it clearly exists to fill a need. Also keep in mind that regardless of how many queer teens your calculations yield, straight teens also read LGBTQ books: to learn about their queer friends and family members, or simply to enjoy a well-written story.

-Excerpted from: Serving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians, pp. 65-66. ©2011 by Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Remember, there is a practical, new How-To-Do-It Tip from Neal-Schuman’s acclaimed How-To-Do-It Manuals® every two weeks. Make sure you never miss an update by subscribing to our blog feed or signing up for email delivery.

Comments Off

Didn’t get a chance to stop by our booth at AASL? Check out our pictures below and save 10% on post-AASL orders. Use coupon code AASL11 at www.neal-schuman.com.

The "Teaching for Inquiry" Dream Team: Ruth Small, Marilyn Arnone, Pam Berger, and Barbara Stripling

Copyright Expert Rebecca Butler with her book, "Copyright for Teachers & Librarians in the 21st Century"

Denise Rehmke and Mary Jo Langhorne, authors of "Developing 21st Century Literacies"

Comments Off

Click here to learn more about the project and grant.

Comments Off