The Google-Library Project: Providing information access for everyone
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Ken Frazier is serving as interim Director of DoIT and campus Chief Information Officer. Frazier is also Director of UW's General Library System. It required a visit from a blind person to enable me to see an obvious opportunity to improve the Google-Library collaboration.
Late last fall, Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), asked to meet with me in Madison to discuss Wisconsin's Google-Library project that was announced in October (see
www.news.wisc.edu/13010.html). The project will make available in digital form a large portion of the book and document collection of the UW-Madison Libraries and the State Historical Society Library. By providing access to these documents to any Internet user, the project will greatly improve the sharing of knowledge. But, as now designed, it will do almost nothing to improve access for the blind to all this knowledge.
Blind people are being left out as electronic technology finds its way into more of our daily lives. The blind find it difficult, for example, to use washing machines and microwave ovens that once had knobs intelligible by touch but now have screens and panels that can only be seen.
The accessibility deficit extends to libraries, where the growth of technology has transformed many valuable resources to digital form, accessible only to those who can see page images. Meanwhile, library resources for the blind remain limited ? the largest single library collection that is fully accessible to the blind contains a mere 60,000 volumes.
The dialogue with the NFB team quickly focused on the potential for using optical character recognition (OCR) software - which already makes the content of most image-based digital collections searchable - to provide access to that content for blind people, with a relatively small additional investment. Before this conversation, I had not given a moment's thought to the immense social benefit that this improvement in access would empower.
In the early stages, we could rely on existing services that reformat materials for students with disabilities. UW-Madison's Badger Accessibility Services, for example, can locate and create accessible audio and text documents. The other universities partnering with Google have similar services. We can leverage these resources to substantially improve access to the library collections made available by the Google-Library project. There is even the possibility of using “Wiki” technology to enable community-based initiatives to reformat content to make it accessible to the blind.
Innovations in accessibility that benefit people who are blind can also help people with other disabilities and the general public. Collections that are most easily reformatted to allow accessibility for the blind - text materials in English with few mathematical symbols - are also likely to be of interest to a wide audience of sighted people.
The Google-Library project is a unique and powerful collaboration that will apply new technologies to promote learning and the discovery of knowledge. That's a good thing. If we can make this huge resource accessible to everyone, however, then the Google-Library collaboration will be a transformative event in the history of information management.