Lois Brock sat in a booth that resembled an industrial refrigerator with a window. Half lit by a small table lamp, she read aloud from a Navajo travel guide titled “Native Road.”
Outside the booth — on the other side of the window — Ron Donnelle monitored Brock for any mistakes, as he recorded the reading. Nearby stood a reel-to-reel tape machine the size of carry-on luggage. It was switched off, idle.
“We’re really getting much more done than we were over here,” said Donnelle, pointing to the machine, apparently with no love lost.
The reader and her monitor are getting more done because they have given up the recording tape and gone digital. It’s a first step into the digital age for the Arizona State Braille and Talking Book Library, a branch of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records Department.
It’s a step that agrees with Brock and Donnelle, volunteers at the Talking Book Library’s Phoenix studio. Brock, 84, is a retired teacher. Donnelle, 64, is a retired laboratory technician.
In going digital, the reel-to-reel recorder is replaced by a computer and software. Recording can be started and stopped on a dime. Corrections are much easier. Volume control is more precise.
Mistakes are easier to erase, or un-erase.
Easier to erase mistakes
Harking back to his reel-to-reel days, Donnelle said, “There was a chance to erase something you didn’t want erased. Once it’s erased, it’s gone.”
With a digital recorder, all you have to do is click “undo,” he said.
Once a book is completed in the studio, the recording is dubbed onto cassette tapes. Each year, the Talking Book Library distributes talking-book cassettes to 11,000 blind and visually impaired Arizona residents.
Nationwide, three-quarters of a million blind and visually impaired people are served by a network of talking-book libraries — all affiliated with the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
The service produces talking books of bestsellers and other works with a broad appeal. The Arizona Talking Book Library fills the niche with books of regional interest. Pioneer memoirs and books about Arizona history are popular.
If all goes as planned at the talking book studio, the reel-to-reel recorder will be history, too. The changeover to digital isn’t cheap, however.
The first phase cost some $80,000, said Linda Montgomery, talking-book library director. That paid for a digital recorder at one of three booths, as well as another machine for a reviewer, a third set of ears to check for goofs that slipped past the monitor. Another big expense was special software.
The money was raised privately by the non-profit Arizona Friends of Talking Book, Montgomery said.
But a bit more fundraising is in store, she added. It will take an additional $60,000 to outfit the other two booths with digital recorders, along with a Talking Book Library booth housed in the Mesa Public Library.
For Carol Watson, talking-book studio manager, the conversion can’t come soon enough.
No reel-to-reel tapes
For one thing, they don’t make reel-to-reel tapes like they used to. As a matter of fact, Watson said, they don’t make them at all. The talking-book library can no longer get them on the open market.
“We’re still getting them from other libraries,” Watson said, referring to talking-book studios in other states. “We just keep asking other libraries as they go digital.”
Then she looked across her own studio — at the hulking tape machines.
“Our biggest problem is trying to keep the dinosaur reel-to-reels running,” Watson said.
Basic repairs are doable. But she knows of nobody in town who can properly calibrate the machines.
“When all those instruments get out of whack, I don’t know what we’re going to do to fix them,” Watson says.
And even when all the booths go digital, the tape machines have to be kept around a few more years, she added. They’ll be needed for some specialty recordings. Magazines, for example, are recorded by a single volunteer who works the machine remotely from inside the booth. Remote controls aren’t available for the digital recorders — at least not yet, Watson says.
National digital move
In its push to go digital, Arizona is not alone. It’s in line with a goal set by the federal government, which created the forerunner to the National Library Service for the Blind in 1931.
The first books didn’t talk. They were in Braille. In 1934, however, 33-1/3 records were introduced — as talking books for the blind. In the 1970s, the move was made to cassette tapes. They’re still in use. They only can be played in special players, which the government makes available for free.
The digital revolution, however, is on its way, Montgomery said.
Speaking of National Library Service officials, she said: “They expect the conversion to be complete by 2011.”
Even after that, books on tape will be widely available. Talking-book clients wary of going digital won’t have to give up their trusty old cassette machines, Montgomery added.
Others, however, will welcome the change.
“A lot of them can’t wait for the new technology,” Montgomery said.
That technology will appear as a digital player about the size of a clock radio. The recorded material will come on a card that looks like a thickly sliced electronic key.
“It’s just at the development stage now, but they’re just about to start production,” Montgomery said.
As with cassettes, clients can order digital talking books from a catalog. And like cassettes, they’ll be a library loan, delivered by mail postage free.
They will also have built-in anti-piracy features. First, the digital card or disk will be copy-protected. And, second, it will only play on the official talking-book digital player.
It goes to the special legal status accorded talking books for the blind. Congress exempted them from copyright law. Everything from the Bible to the latest John Grisham thriller is available for free, but only in a format “exclusively for use by the blind or other persons with disabilities.”
As for Brock and Donnelle, they will soon start a book on Arizona politics — a recording that could speak volumes.