aserl-accessibilityig Mailing List: EMMA is open for business

[Unsworth, John M (jmu2m) (unsworth]

Hi folks,

As you will all most likely already know, GA Tech’s Access Text Network 
disappeared on April 1st, with no notice.  Allegedly, the AAP was 
surprised—they’d been renegotiating their contract with GA Tech and apparently 
couldn’t agree on terms.  I believe AAP is looking for a new provider, but 
meanwhile EMMA has accelerated its opening from July to last Monday.  Managers 
at disability services are encouraged to go here:

https://emma.lib.virginia.edu/enrollment/new

and create a request to enroll, using (please) an individual university email 
address.  At that point, we’ll create an organization in EMMA that this person 
(or designated others) will manage, so they can add and delete accounts for 
staff and student workers in their organization, also using individual 
university accounts.   As part of enrollment, I will also subscribe them to the 
emma-users [at] virginia.edu<mailto:emma-users [at] virginia.edu> mailman list, 
which is currently being used both to provide updates to users of our beta 
service, and to relay requests for texts from one user to the 
community—requests that can be fulfilled using the single-file upload in EMMA.

Just so far this week, we’ve enrolled over a hundred universities, colleges, 
and community colleges across the US and Canada (yay Marrakesh Treaty!)

We’re also encouraging new DSO members to seek out library partners as people 
who could help with a spreadsheet-based bulk upload process we’ve developed, in 
which we provide some nifty utilities for filling in bibliographic metadata—the 
purpose of this partnership would be to mitigate the burden of sharing.

However, there are probably other ways that librarians could be (or already 
are) involved.  For example at UVA I’ve learned that our ILL folks use an ILL 
workflow to fulfill digitization requests from our disability services office, 
out of our collections.  I’m curious about whether other ILL operations in 
ASERL are doing similar things, or cooperating with one another in this 
channel, where a DSO staffer makes the request on behalf of a student with a 
qualified disability.

John