The Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead is engaged in a project which aims
to enrich the quality of the experience of choosing an audio book. It will
do this by allowing library visitors to listen to a small sample of a book
they might want to loan, to listen and hear what it sounds like, to
experience not only the essence of the book, but the quality and style of
the narration.
The audio sample will be directly accessible via a hyperlink from library
catalogues and there will also be a website from where all available samples
may be searched and experienced directly.
The service is primarily aimed at visitors with a visual impairment but will
equally assist any visitor interested in enjoying the audio version of a
book.
RBWM use the Dynix system but our aim is to link webwords to all library
authority's catalogues and to this end the webwords' team would like to hear
from any parties interested in exploring how their library catalogue system
might be linked to the webwords' database.
The full webwords' site, www.webwords.org <http://www.webwords.org> is
currently under construction, the full service is due to be launched in
March 2003.
The National Lottery's New Opportunities Excellence Fund (www.nof.org.uk
<http://www.nof.org.uk> ) is funding the project and design advice is being
sought from the Berkshire County Blind Society and the Royal National
Institute for the Blind among other agencies.
We are very grateful to a number of publishers for giving us permission to
use their copyrighted material from which to construct the samples.
A test version of the webwords experience may be found at the RBWM Library
Catalogue <http://195.166.19.164/webclientnew.html> . Search for 'The Shark
Mutiny' (Published by W. F. Howse
<http://www.edisure.com/~howes/wfhowes/edindex.html> ) and select the cd
format. Recorded under 'Notes' is the invitation to 'Listen to webwords
sample at' and the sound sample's URL. To listen to the sample your media
player must be enabled to play mp3 format files.
This is a test set up only. The URL will change and the invitation will
appear under a different heading - the marc standard for a URL.
If you want to know more about webwords or are interested in exploring how
to link your library's catalogue to webwords, please contact us at the
address below.
webwords: listen before you choose.
Colin Worley
webwords Project Manager
Library and Information Services
Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead
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