Founded in 1996, the DAISY Consortium has overcome many difficulties and setbacks to become one of the most efficient organisations working for people with disabilities at the international level. It has created for its end customers - people who are print-disabled - a unique added value, the possibilities of which are far from exhausted at the present time.
If we attempt to reduce the work of the DAISY Consortium thus far to its bare essentials, I believe we can cite two main achievements:
Circumstances have dictated that until now most of the DAISY Consortium's resources have been used to create the standard and solve the technical problems arising from the changeover from an analogue to a digital library (production software, playback instruments, A/D and D/A conversion). All the energies of the organisations had been taken up by the planning and organisation of the transition from cassette to DAISY technology at regional or national level.
The technologies forming and underpinning DAISY are of little interest to our end customers. To them, the following aspects are what matters:
In two to three years' time DAISY technology will be used in many organisations as a matter of complete routine and analogue library holdings will be daisyfied as required. People will already be routinely upgrading DAISY holdings to the latest version of the standard as it continues to evolve. In many places, analogue technology will already have been consigned to history and considered ready for the museum, and even the last intractable, sceptical customers will have acquired a player and be raving about DAISY.
It would however be a great mistake to assume from this consolidation phase in the individual member organisations that the work of the DAISY Consortium is now over.
The DAISY Consortium must take on the task of expanding and increasingly exploiting the value-added potential in its technology for all kinds of end users - the rapid exchange of all kinds of increasingly accessible information held in libraries.
The last statement constitutes an entire programme whose perspective is focused on the end user of the technology, who is not interested in its inner workings. Viewed from this perspective, the DAISY Consortium is still in its infancy.
The goal determines the strategy, i.e. how to achieve the goal. We often lose sight of our goal because we are busy dealing with short- and medium-term problems.
I believe it is worthwhile thinking big, if we are to bring to fruition the potential locked inside the DAISY Consortium. The procedure to be chosen must, if it is to be successful, follow a specific order as part of a systematic perspective:
Allow me to split the above programme statement into its component parts and draw out its strategic consequences.
Essentially, this statement sets out two tasks from a strategic perspective:
If the two tasks are completed, this will ensure that the technological criteria are continuously and systematically kept up to date.
If we are able to establish within the DAISY Consortium an awareness that the expression "all kinds of end users" conceals a whole world, much progress will have been made towards formulating appropriate strategies. End users could be divided into the following classes:
This list has quite far-reaching strategic consequences.
One of the key factors in DAISY technology's added value for end users is that, thanks to their common format, DAISY books can be exchanged effortlessly and extremely rapidly anywhere in the world. If we bear in mind how limited the holdings of information compiled in a suitable form for disabled people are in comparison with the publications available for non-disabled people, we can judge how much is to be gained if the worldwide production of media for the disabled were available to all at any time within a useful period.
Thanks to ever-faster high-speed connections it will soon be possible, if it is not already, to download even massive amounts of data in an extremely short space of time. It is fairly safe to assume that the network distribution of DAISY books will be with us sooner or later. The DAISY Consortium should be gearing itself up for this eventuality.
However, the intention should not be to wait until an internationally coordinated and implemented network distribution model is up and running. Bilateral or multilateral agreements between DAISY Consortium members can already provide substantial benefits for end users.
For example, the SBS is interested in including works produced in English, US English, Spanish, French and other languages in its lending stock. Exchanging was already institutionalised between German-language talking-book libraries many years ago in the cassette era and it is now continuing in the DAISY era. Libraries buy each other's productions for a flat-rate payment of euro 100. Aside from the DAISY Consortium, the SBS pursues the same strategy in the field of Braille music production. A mutual exchange of relevant productions has been agreed with ONCE.
If the world's entire holding of DAISY productions is available all at once, it is unavoidable that this holding, if it is to be profitable, will be kept in the form of a library which can be interrogated.
Our task must then be to develop and implement models that make it possible to consult a bibliography of the international holding of DAISY books, interrogate it and order the desired works after carrying out searches.
Ten years have passed since the General Meeting in Zurich in May 2004. Despite many difficulties and setbacks, the DAISY Consortium has taken two decisive steps towards realising the visions formulated in that year.
It should first be mentioned that Version 6.0 of the DAISY standard was approved two years ago (2012) and the latest versions of the production and playback tool have now implemented this new version of the standard. The upgrading of DAISY holdings from Version 5.5 to 6.0 of the standard is going off without a hitch thanks to the software called NOPROBLEM and because most of the producing members have now filed their holdings in mass storages and upgrades can be performed automatically at the server in minutes.
Work has already started on the next version of the standard. This will mainly involve the integration of scent synchronisation based on SMIL 7.0. This will make a seductive addition to the complex synchronisation of the different perceptual channels (TEXT, AUDIO, IMAGE, VIDEO and SMELL) and will have a special appeal for the steadily growing band of audio description fans who since many years were waiting to see integrated Smell in the DAISY Standard.
Unfortunately, the Consortium has been less successful in its efforts, which have been ongoing for many years, to resolve the copyright issue once and for all at international level. As before, copyright continues to be anchored in national legislation and the restrictions and conditions to be met are consequently many and varied.
Nevertheless, it has succeeded in creating the central reference, server and distribution network IKARUS, a system that allows end users anywhere in the world to order available DAISY productions from DAISY Consortium members connected to the network and have them delivered within a few days. The IKARUS administration software PEGASUS is the key factor in the operation of IKARUS. Its main task is to ensure that the copyright status of each title has been documented and distribution can only take place in accordance with this status.
At this juncture, it should be mentioned that IKARUS could not have been created without the involvement of three international telecommunication groups and seven major banks. They have been supporting the work of the DAISY Consortium since 2007 by making non-cash contributions (servers, storage space) and providing software development resources (PEGASUS) worth a total of USD 5m.
IKARUS has proved to be the right path to follow as IKARUS has ceased to be a mere pool for the DAISY titles produced by disabled organisations (750,000 titles from 102 producers). Now the central IKARUS server and distribution system has also been discovered by commercial publishers. The number of publishers connected to the system has tripled to 45 over the past four years. Together they have already added over 8,000 commercially distributed DAISY titles to the system, of which some 2.5 million copies are sold annually via IKARUS at the present time.
Enormous efforts were required to bring about the situation described above and persuade the mainstream consumer electronics industry to modify its playback tools to read DAISY. It was only when three heavyweights, publishers A, B and C, the main producers of commercial talking books (audio CDs) and DAISY books, joined the IKARUS pool that consumer electronics manufacturers dropped their objections and are now making a (growing) proportion of their products DAISY-compatible.
We should not overlook the fact that the service for commercial talking-book producers provided by the DAISY Consortium means that 3% of sales revenue ends up in the coffers of the DAISY Consortium for each book sold through this channel. As we have now achieved a gross turnover of USD 2.1m, it is already possible to cover the running costs of IKARUS. Version 3.0 of PEGASUS, which has been in use since 2011, integrates the distribution of commercial talking-book productions and has certainly proved its worth.
The increasing integration of commercial and not-for-profit production of DAISY books raises the question of whether the DAISY Consortium should depart from its strategy of keeping production licences free of charge in all cases and under all circumstances. After all, it should be noted that the majority of the DAISY books produced by DAISY Consortium members have a potential market that extends far beyond disabled groups. Against this background, I believe our aim should be to have bilateral licence agreements concluded between the publishers and between the DAISY Consortium and the publishers who will be distributing the books via IKARUS on a commercial basis. This seems all the more desirable as various DAISY members are already producing DAISY books on behalf of publishers for commercial sale.
IKARUS can also be considered extremely promising in terms of disability policies. The worldwide exchange of DAISY productions across linguistic and cultural boundaries is conducive to the political, social, professional and cultural integration of disabled people in this fully globalised world. This can be safely assumed at any rate if we bear in mind the fact that the international distribution of DAISY books across linguistic boundaries has increased by over 600% in the past five years. If we confine the increase to educational and specialist literature, we can report growth of as much as 700%. Within a European context, we can observe the way the number of people with disabilities, in particular blind and visually impaired people, who are entering professions which until now were not accessible to them (teachers, translators, historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, business administrators, etc.) is starting to show a significant increase, as evidenced by the European Union's statistics on disability.
Already in 2004 the DAISY Consortium could look back on a history of success. The imaginary progress report on the DAISY Consortium in the year 2014 is the expression of a vision based on the conviction that we must keep going forward and that the Consortium's evolution will and should never stop.
Just a dream? Possibly.
But we should leave no stone unturned in our efforts to make it come true.
Zurich, 3 May 2004