FRAME and EMMA: Enabling responsible sharing of resources remediated for accessibility
What is it about?
The FRAME project is a collaboration between eight academic libraries and the disability services offices at the same universities, along with four major repositories of content: Benetech's Bookshare, the Internet Archive, the HathiTrust, and Canada's ACE Portal, to create a system to enable content remediated by any of the members to be shared with qualified recipients at any other member institution. The project has resulted in the creation of a fifth repository, EMMA, which stores remediated content not originating in one of the member repositories and which provides unified search across all the repositories employing a sophisticated user interface based on a new metadata model describing remediated content. That metadata model has been submitted to NISO for standardization. In addition, a curriculum has been developed for masters-level information studies programs to teach about accessibility.
Why is it important?
Currently, content remediated at one institution is almost never shared, resulting in tremendous waste: the same book, chapter, or journal article could be remediated at scores of institutions. The EMMA system developed by the FRAME project creates a trusted system by which these resources can now be responsibly and legally shared, dramatically reducing the workload on disability services offices, who can now locate remediated versions of resources they need instead of repeating the remediation others have done.