Present: G. Allen, M. Belsky, G. Blievernicht, J.Eulenberg, D.Forro, M. Hudson, D. Kleinhardt, J. Lowman, J.Renuk, R. Wittick.
1. Eulenberg brought the meeting to order at 1:35 p.m.
2. Hudson reviewed the need for upgrades of software licenses. We currently have site licenses for several applications, typically permitting between 10 and 15 simultaneous users throughout the university, depending on pricing. These applications need either renewing or upgrading, depending on circumstances. For example, the text-to-speech program, Dragon Dictate, needs to be upgraded to its realtime speech recognition cousin, Naturally Speaking.
3. Forro reviewed the Libraries' coming requests:
(a) Hand-held closed circuit TV device for vision impaired users to take into the stacks. She has not located a particular device as of yet, but expects to by next week's meeting. It would be appropriate to obtain 2 of these, for the sake of redundancy.
(b) A second scanner to add to the current Kurzweil 1000. We have enough users to justify a second scanner, and the redundancy issue is another reason to have more than one. Eulenberg noted the utility of this device for general library users, as well. It should be big, fast, and accurate, and it should have a feeder.
4. Belsky circulated a document describing the need for a laptop PC for use by our realtime captioner. This PC should have an active matrix screen, a stenographic transcriber (SRT 400 Realtime Writer), and appropriate software (to be specified next week).
5. Hudson reviewed our e-text needs for Lowman, pointing out the importance for searching of having a one-to-one correspondence between pages in the original document and pages in the scanned document. Lowman asked how long post-editing takes; Hudson replied that, although it is time consuming, improvements in scanning, OCR, and word recognition technology continue to chip away at the remaining need for corrections.
6. Forro reviewed library access to e-journals. The J-Store project is a CIC initiative to put back issues of journals on the web. (Interested persons can find links to information on this project in the library's web site.) Some journals, in addition, are publishing both hard-copy and electronically. However, some of the online versions are simply bitmapped copies of printed journal pages, making them unusable for vision impaired, even if they have been keyword searched by the publisher.
7. Meeting adjourned (Lowman, Renuk) at 2:13 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
George D. Allen, Recording Secretary
The URL for this page is
http://www.msu.edu/unit/atc/minutes/990120.html.
Last updated 21 April 1999.