Graduate students at UofT researching First Nation reading interests in On-Demand Book Service
What do you read? What do you want to read?
Students from the University of Toronto's library school would like to know about
your reading needs and preferences.
Click here to take their survey and
tell them what you think
Visit their Online Meeting Place at http://odbs.knet.ca to learn more about this possible service and their work.
From the Survey Information Page ...
As information professionals and students of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, our mission is to provide universal access to books and other information resources. We believe that universal access must include Canada’s remote and rural First Nations communities.
This semester, we have undertaken a project to explore an alternative way to provide First Nations libraries and readers with books and other reading materials. It’s an idea that uses the Internet, computers, and relatively low-cost printing and bookbinding methods to bring the world of online content into the hands of readers. It’s called the On-Demand Book Service (ODBS).
The On-Demand Book Service (ODBS) would enable you to choose from a list of online titles, then print and bind an actual book… all in one visit to the library (or another central space in your community)! We’ve already conducted a few classroom experiments and have tested the process in action. We are very excited about this ODBS project, and after learning about it, we hope you will be too.
Our vision is to have users download and print online contents using an all-in-one book printing system that plugs into your computer and the Internet. First, users would browse an ODBS web site (a portal) to search through digital book collections. These collections could even be expanded to include contents that users create themselves (like newsletters, artwork, poems, recipes, or children's stories). Since it’s online, the ODBS web portal could be expanded to include other media such as video and audio files.
The next step would be for users to print the pages of the book using a printer. The last step would be to bind the pages into a book using special, easy to use equipment.
The purpose of this survey is to gather information about the potential users of this ODBS, and what kinds of information and content you want and need the most. We'd also like to know about the facilities in your community.
We really value your input, so please take a moment to answer our questions. It will take you, at most, 15 minutes to complete the survey (you are not obligated to answer all questions, if you don't want to).
For more information about our project visit the website for the ODBS, on K-NET, at www.odbs.knet.ca. Or, you can email ondemandbookservice@gmail.com for more information. We thank you in advance for your time!