Indiana University, Bookshare.org Partnership Expands Textbook Access for College Students with Disabilities

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Palo Alto, CA/Bloomington, Indiana, March 12, 2004: Indiana University, developer of one of the nation’s leading alternative text production facilities serving students with disabilities, has partnered with Bookshare.org, the leading online library serving individuals with reading-related disabilities, to make college textbooks available to students with disabilities nationwide.

Under the terms of the partnership, Indiana University will contribute all textbooks scanned in its production facility to the growing Bookshare.org library, the largest contribution of education-specific materials to Bookshare.org to date. These materials will be made available only to individuals with qualifying disabilities including visual impairments, mobility impairments, and learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Qualifying Bookshare.org members may access the materials online by becoming subscribers themselves, or through access sponsored by an organization such as a university or college.

The arrangement ensures that Indiana University students with qualifying disabilities will receive full access to the Bookshare.org collection of more than 16,000 books including required course materials, reference books and the latest best-sellers.

The Bookshare.org collection consists of books scanned by individuals and schools making print materials accessible using scanning and optical character recognition technology, as well as books contributed directly by publishers and authors in original digital forms. Indiana joins a number of schools nationwide in the effort to maximize the educational impact of Bookshare.org by sharing the textbooks they have scanned for their students. The scale and history of Indiana’s book-scanning operation – which has produced more than 1800 books to date – promises to make Bookshare.org a key resource for students at post-secondary institutions.

“Bookshare.org’s online library of accessible materials has always had great promise for use by students,” Senior Product Manager Alison Lingane acknowledged. “And we expect that this partnership with a leader in the field like Indiana University will help further that promise.” Lingane noted that because textbook scanning is such a labor-intensive process, sharing by Indiana and other institutions will help ease the burden on providers of services to students with disabilities.

“We’ve spent several years developing a book scanning operation that can effectively meet the alternative text needs of our students with disabilities,” says Margaret Londergan, Manager of the Adaptive Technology Center at Indiana University, “and we understand the effort and resources required to do so. So we’re very excited about the opportunity to share books through Bookshare.org, and decrease the duplication of effort at universities nationwide. As more institutions join us in partnering with Bookshare.org, the impact of our collective scanning efforts on educational opportunities for disabled students will only increase.”

About Bookshare.org

Bookshare.org offers a collection of 17,000 accessible digital books to its members. The books are protected by a comprehensive digital rights management plan, which features extensive controls, including file encryption, watermarks, fingerprinting and a security watch program. Bookshare.org builds on 15 years of work in the adaptive technology field, originally under the Arkenstone name.

About Indiana University Adaptive Technology Center

The Adaptive Technology Center at Indiana University was founded by Margaret Londergan in 1999. Since that time technology based services for students with disabilities have grown to include provision of alternate media (Braille, MP3, electronic text, audio transcriptions), a laptop loaner program, a software loaner program, and deployment of a rich suite of adaptive software in many sites on campus. Training materials for adaptive software are currently under development using modularized video for those with dyslexia. Extensive individual and group training on use of adaptive hardware and software is provided through the Adaptive Technology Center. The class on web accessibility continues to be one of the most popular. Of particular interest is the ability of the Center to provide materials in alternate format in a timely manner to meet the needs of students with disabilities.

About Benetech

The Benetech Initiative is a Silicon Valley nonprofit that develops sustainable, technology-based solutions to address pressing social challenges in areas such as disability, human rights, education and literacy. Many beneficial technologies have compelling social applications that are not developed because such efforts do not meet for-profit investors’ financial expectations. Benetech specifically pursues endeavors with a strong social, rather than financial, rate of return on investment, bringing commercial technology and private sector management techniques to bear in creating innovative, non-traditional solutions to challenging social issues. More information on Benetech and its projects can be found at www.benetech.org or by calling (650) 475-5440.

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