International treaty adds hundreds of foreign language books to NLS catalog

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International treaty adds hundreds of foreign language books to NLS catalog

By Mark Layman

The email from the San Francisco Public Library’s Talking Books and Braille Center found its way to Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, foreign language librarian at the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS): A patron had requested a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—in Spanish. Could NLS help?

Corlett-Rivera found a digital audio copy of Así habló Zaratustra through the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), and within two weeks it was up on BARD, the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download service.

Another satisfied NLS patron. And another success story from NLS’s participation in the Marrakesh Treaty.

It’s been only a year since NLS cleared the last legal hurdle to full participation in the cross-border exchange of accessible books under the treaty. But its patrons are already reaping big benefits.

More than 1,000 titles obtained under the treaty have been added to BARD in a variety of languages including Arabic, French, German, Greek, Polish, Spanish and Vietnamese. Patrons have downloaded these titles more than 20,000 times.

NLS has reciprocated by sharing its collection with Canada’s Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA), the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People, Germany’s Deutsches Zentrum für barrierefreies Lesen and Chile’s Música y Braille. NLS has also uploaded tens of thousands of audio and braille books to the ABC Global Book Service, making them available to organizations that serve blind and print disabled readers in more than 50 countries.

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The road to NLS’s full participation in the Marrakesh Treaty was a long one. The treaty was finalized at a conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, in June 2013; the US signed it the following October. The Senate ratified the treaty in June 2018 and simultaneously passed the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act to amend US law in accordance with the treaty. The House of Representatives quickly followed suit, and President Trump signed the legislation that fall.

 “As we increase the size of our collections in these languages, we can increase outreach and, long term, increase the number of foreign language-speaking NLS patrons, while better serving our current foreign language speakers.”
— Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, NLS Foreign Language Librarian

The treaty facilitates the exchange of accessible books across international borders by organizations that serve people who are blind, visually impaired or print disabled. One of 26 international copyright treaties administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), it aims to address what advocates call a worldwide “famine” of accessible books. According to WIPO, less than 7 percent of the millions of books published each year are available in accessible formats for the 285 million people in the world who are blind, visually impaired or print disabled—90 percent of whom live in developing countries.

“NLS has one of the largest collections of accessible books in the world, so sharing it with other countries is making a tremendous difference,” Corlett-Rivera says. NLS books have already been downloaded more than 4,700 times by 34 different organizations around the world.

But NLS’s participation in the treaty is making a difference for its own patrons, too.

“It allows us to acquire foreign language titles faster—and at less cost—than if we recorded them ourselves,” Corlett-Rivera says. “It also helps us expand our collection to meet the changing demographics of our patrons.” Most of NLS’s foreign language books are in Spanish, but NLS patrons also speak Tagalog/Filipino, Vietnamese, Russian, Haitian Creole, Arabic and many other languages. “As we increase the size of our collections in these languages, we can increase outreach and, long term, increase the number of foreign language-speaking NLS patrons, while better serving our current foreign language speakers,” she says.

And it’s not just foreign language-speaking patrons who benefit from NLS’s participation in the Marrakesh treaty. So far, 150 audiobooks in English have been added to the collection, courtesy of Canada’s CELA. They’ve been downloaded by NLS patrons more than 11,000 times. The top 10 includes three titles from a series by Mindy Starns Clark and Leslie Gould: The Amish Midwife, The Amish Nanny and The Amish Bride, confirming for Corlett-Rivera and her colleagues in the Collection Development Section that “there is no such thing as too many Amish Romances in your collection.” NLS patrons can also access 195 braille titles in English from CELA. There are plans to add hundreds more titles in English from CELA in both audio and braille.

Full participation in the Marrakesh Treaty came with some challenges—technical as well as bibliographic. For example, audiobooks acquired from foreign partners often are coded in a different digital format than NLS uses, so NLS created a new conversion tool to access that content. NLS staff developed processes by which Marrakesh titles can be selected in a systematic fashion according to what patrons most want to read, and developed new cataloging standards that are accessible and succinct while being helpfully descriptive.

Of course, all this effort is for naught if patrons can’t find the new foreign language titles. So NLS recently added an easy-to-use “search by language” function to BARD for those wishing to narrow their results to a specific language. And the first issue of Foreign Language Quarterly debuted online this summer, highlighting popular titles recently added to the collection via the Marrakesh Treaty, as well as foreign language titles produced by NLS.

“The implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty has brought together people working in almost every part of NLS—from technical experts handling format conversion issues to foreign language catalogers wading through diacritics in Voyager to developers customizing BARD to ensure that patrons can find the amazing selection of books we’ve added to the collection,” says Corlett-Rivera, who came to NLS last summer after working as a librarian at the University of Maryland. “I feel like I joined NLS at exactly the right time.”