VIDEO CLIP Excerpt: RFB$D. More than 50 years of helping people achieve personal success through the spoken word. On behalf of members everywhere, I'd like to tell all of you who have helped in so many ways, how much we appreciate it. To those who have been with us in the past. And especially those who will join us in the important mission going forward, we thank you. I'm Dion (Quan) for RFB&D, Learning Through Listening.
RFB&D, Learning Through Listening Producer is Morgan Roth, Producer Jim Sweeney.
Jim Elliot: I hope that didn't sound to much like a commercial. But we use that particular video in lots of different places. And it kind of covers all the basics. And so I thought we'd start off with that.
Here's what I'd like to do. We don't have a lot of time. I'm going to give you some really brief information on where we are right now. In what we can do. And then answer your questions. There's not a lot of us in the room so we get to do that, because it's kind of small and interactive here.
I have all afternoon. I know you don't. My job at RFB%D is production. I'm the one that schedules the volunteer's time in the recording booths. Edits the material and do our checking. And then produce that recording on a couple of different kinds of media depending what the order calls for.
In the past and you saw pictures of that. You saw a lot of the reel to reel, which is the analog tapes. We still have those. And we are still recording on those to some extent because our borrowers, overall, still are using the cassette players; It's because that's what they have. If they want their recordings on cassettes we give them to them on cassettes. We have a way of taking our digital that we're producing because in Denver, as in two thirds of all our studios, which is about 22 of them right now, we're all digital.
We record digitally only. However, we can, for those borrowers who still have the four track tape players. We can convert those from digital to those cassettes and include the beep tone system.
Here's the interesting thing. I walked around downstairs. I hope you did that too. Here's what our borrowers have told us. Now we've got a 50 year history here. That's good, because we know that people that borrow it. But also, any organization that is 50 years old, you know, there kind of slow to change. And so we're kind of dealing with both those things at the same time.
Our borrowers have told us here are the things they need. They need. First of all, their books on time. Primarily these are college students. Although we have elementary books. We have high schools books. We have graduate books. The majority of our borrowers are either in a four year university or graduate school. And there's various reasons for that we don't need to get into. They tell us they need to get their books on time. Because if they don't, they can't finish their courses. And the worst thing that we could see is that someone cancel an order because they've had to drop a class. That's what is that we do. The founder's statement of this whole organization and the premise was that education is a right, it's not a privilege. It's a right. And we're a non-profit corporation. We are not trying to make money off of people who are giving difficulty learning. We're trying to provide them the services and we're funded by individuals and foundations. It's a different kind of relationship.
Our borrowers say, give us our tapes on time. And they also said give us human voices. We can voice generate material and to some extent we're doing it slightly. And we know we're gong to do it more in the past.
Here's the unique thing about the recordings that we can give out. We describe in a textbook. Now if you've taken Biology. If you've taken a course in Geology or physical science, you know that those books are jam packed with pictures, charts and graphs. Our readers who are proficient in their fields will read the pictures, the charts and graphs in detail. So that someone who is not able to see that picture, could understand what that picture represents and not miss that. You can't do that on the computer.
I was watching an amazing technology downstairs, but I was listening to that and that was the one hole in the program that I saw. And if you're a borrower, you'll understand that. It just, there not there for decoration. There's purposes for those pictures. So the borrowers appreciate the human voice. And we're going to continue to do that.
I know in the future we will do more voice generated. We'll do e-text and we will take text and we will have it read right into the computer, by a computer however, we'll probably still have a volunteer because they don't cost anything and in Denver, we have over 200 people reading. Just in Denver. And we're just one of 30 units. There's thousands of these people. They love to do it. And there very good at it.
We will probably have them add the pictures, charts and graphs to the textbooks. And put that all on one CD.
So, we've got cassettes. We have lots of those available. This is the equipment that was in our September rollout. That's been probably ten years in the making. I'm gonna pop in a disk here and any of you that have used this material will appreciate the fact that navigation is important. Navigation means that a borrower can move from one point to another on either a cassette tape or a CD.
A cassette, we use the beep tone system. We mark every chapter or every page with a single beep. And you could only hear it at fat forward or fast reverse. At normal playing speed, it would was kind of a hum. But that allowed somebody to got from page to page. If you were doing recreational reading, probably that wouldn't matter. And there's some organizations that specialize in that. Talking books is one of those. They produce all kinds of material. And we're not in any kind of competition. They send people to us. We send them to them. Because they know we do textbooks really well.
If you're a college student, you don't want to have to go through a third of a book to find a particular paragraph. You want to be able to get to it. The beep tone system was good. One tone for a page. Two tones for a chapter. You could kind of hone in on stuff, but you still had a page to go through. Certainly it was better than nothing at all.
However, with the CD's, we have a method now called TOC, table of contents. The table of contents method of navigation will allow the reader to read the table of contents in the book and take that information and go to any place instantly in the book. By sub-heading. By chapter title. By page number. Whatever's in the table of contents, that's what we've put in electronically and allow those borrowers to move. Can you see the advantage of that? The fact that if you're a college student, time is of the essence. I mean how many of you study at 3 o'clock in the morning. Come on, everybody has done it. Everybody is going to continue to do that. You need something that you can get through, right?
I brought a Victor along, which is the player that we know will be used more and more often. However this will be replaced simply by a CD, through the Internet to your laptop or your home computer. We could do that now. The hundred thousand books that we have in our library, we could download to any student right now. However, we've got some issues with the publishers. And we want to keep a good working relationship with them because we have permission from all the publishers to do this. And if you've ever read the front of a book, it has some things in here which we have to take real seriously.
In fact, here's the disclaimer we read. This is an actual one from an actual book. I found this laying on the floor before I cam in here and I cleaned it up a little bit. Let me read to what it is that it says.
"Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, shelf number, mr002. Introduction to Teaching." And then the authors. But here's the important part. Produced by the Denver unit of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, through the generosity of our donors and with the kink permission of the publisher, Meryl Prentice Hall, Saddle River, New Jersey. Copyright, 2002.
The contents of this book is protected by copyright law and may be used only by RFB&D members who have provided evidence of print disability. Copying and sharing or redistribution of this audio book is strictly prohibited. When you finish the book, please return it to RFB&D in the pre-printed sleeve provided.
We're a library service. I mean, libraries have been doing this forever. And that's how we maintain the relationship with the publishers by protecting their rights to their books. Can you imagine what would happen if we took a popular book... I remember one, a biology book by Sylvia, my gosh I said that a billion times, Nadar, Sylvia Mader, that's what it was because her husband's name is Ralph and he was mentioned too. And I say that because they write books regularly that are used in most universities. It's the entry level biology book.
What would happen if we took that material. Put in on the Internet and downloaded it to anybody who could download it to anybody else. We have just given that book away. Its just.. It just seems a littlie unfair. That we can not give, to anyone who asks for it, as quickly as possible, the information they need. That's our desire. I mean that's the burning desire at RFB&D. But we're limited by copyright law and we're going to take care of that by issuing our borrowers instead of number codes, we'll give them pin numbers. They've got fancy names for it, but it's basically an ID number. So now we can electronically download to a home computer with their ID code and give them all this information and they can read it right there.
The software is very inexpensive. We're just working through the issues. Given enough time, we will resolve all of that. As the people downstairs will too. I mean, we'll do that as a group. RFB&D is part of the Daisy Consortium, the Digital Audio International Symposium. And we're taking care of those issues.