Working Together: Research Libraries and Publishers on the Value of Inclusive Learning Resources

ARL is offering a free webinar to raise awareness about the value of producing or procuring accessible born-digital resources to support library users of all abilities. The webinar is intended for library administrators and staff, as well as members of the publishing community. 

This webinar is part of the accessibility awareness program being produced by ARL’s Accessibility and Universal Design Working Group and ARL visiting program officer Katya Pereyaslavska.

Webinar Goals

The webinar is designed to:

• Raise awareness of accessibility standards and help establish a community of practice across research libraries and affiliated vendors
• Share how research libraries in the United States and Canada are evolving to foster more inclusive learning environments for users of all abilities
• Develop awareness among (and research library partnerships with) scholarly publishers to achieve a shared strategic goal of compliance with accessibility legislation
• Cultivate mindfulness of the obligations and responsibilities of publishers and research libraries with respect to providing accessible content to students and researchers with reading disabilities
• Increase understanding of the needs of print-disabled users and the formats and delivery models that are required to address the range of needs of that diverse group
• Initiate an active dialogue among stakeholders that will encourage the development of new and innovative solutions to the problems of equitable access

Presenters

Katya Pereyaslavska (MA, MI) is a project management librarian at Scholars Portal and a visiting program officer at the Association of Research Libraries in 2014–2015.

Katya works at Scholars Portal, Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), as the project manager for accessible projects such as the Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE). In this role she has supervised the development of the accessible texts repository and worked with OCUL experts to assemble an Accessible Information Toolkit to support OCUL institutions in improving accessibility of local resources and services. Following the successful pilot year, ACE is now a fully operational service supported by OCUL, and Katya is currently supervising the completion of the Report on Accessible Media (ROAM) due to be completed in March 2015.

Kim Brewster is the publisher/group product manager of the Higher Education Division for McGraw-Hill Education.

Since 1991, Kim has worked in both legal and academic publishing at Butterworths, Lexis/Nexis, and McGraw-Hill Education, in roles ranging from researcher, legal editor, managing editor, sponsoring/acquisitions editor, to publisher. In her current position she manages a portfolio of 14 disciplines and has chaired the corporate Accessibility Committee since its formation in 2011.

Stephen Spong is a librarian at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Ontario.

Stephen holds a master’s in information from the University of Toronto iSchool and a JD from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. He has written and presented extensively on a variety of topics related to accessibility and copyright in Canada and the United States. When he is not poring over mind-numbing legalese, he can usually be found fending his cat off whatever new recipes he’s trying from his extensive collection of cookbooks. He can be found on Twitter as @thelibeerian.

Laura Wood is director of Tisch Library at Tufts University.

Laura joined Tufts University in 2011 as the director of Tisch Library. From 2004 to 2011, she was the librarian of Andover-Harvard Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School. Prior to working at Harvard, Laura held the position of technical services librarian and periodicals librarian at Pitts Theology Library at Emory University. Beyond Tufts, she serves on the boards of directors for the Boston Library Consortium and for DuraSpace, and she was previously a board member and board president for the American Theological Library Association. Laura holds the following degrees: MBA from Emory University, MS in information and library sciences from the University of Michigan, MA in religion from Yale University, and AB from Mount Holyoke College.

Robin Seaman is the director of content acquisition for the Silicon Valley nonprofit Benetech, which runs Bookshare—the largest digital library in the world for people with print disabilities.

Robin also oversees Benetech’s Born Accesssible Initiative, whose goal is to ensure that born-digital content is “born accessible,” and she chairs the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Accessible Publishing Working Group. She has over 25 years of experience in print and digital publishing spaning trade, academic, educational, and technology publishing sectors. She was the director of content for the Rocket eBook, the first handheld electronic reading device, and has held a variety of marketing roles in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area with Macmillan, Oxford University Press, The Crown Publishing Group, HarperCollins, and IDG Books. Robin holds a BA in comparative literature and an MA in Slavic languages and literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Registration

Register online free of charge.

Live captioning will be available during the webcast.