[bksvol-discuss] NIMAC books
- From: <Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:18:44 -0800
NIMAS is a format: the National Instructional Materials Accessibility
Standard. NIMAS is a flavor of the DAISY standard that specifies a
minimum level of DAISY tags, more than you'd get if you just scanned the
book.
NIMAC is a place: the National Instructional Materials Accessibility
Center. It's located at the American Printing House for the Blind, as a
project funded directly by Congress in the 2004 Individuals with
Disability Education Act.
K-12 publishers are required to put all textbooks into the NIMAS format
and deposit them in the NIMAC. We get them from the NIMAC, convert them
into student-ready DAISY, and add them to our collections with strings
attached that come from APH's policies. Part of these strings come from
the terms of the law, some come because publishers have put pressure to
limit the scope of this, and some have come because of APH's comfort
level as the group in charge of the NIMAC.
It's permitted to scan these same books, proofread them, and add them to
the Bookshare.org collection without these particular strings attached.
Of course, all of our books have some kinds of restrictions: for
example, our Canadian users can only download books that we have
permissions to provide internationally (or public domain).
Our goal is to minimize these restrictions at every opportunity.
Textbooks are too important for print disabled students to have to not
implement the NIMAC-developed restrictions. Many K-12 textbooks are a
bear to scan, and it's great that the publishers (who have the easiest
access to digital versions of their content) are responsible for
delivering it.
Jim Fruchterman
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