convalescent homes/prisons

[Anna Maria]

I don't know if this has already been a subject of discussion, but last night, after I had completed (almost) the translation into Italian, and was trying to get to sleep, a phrase I had read popped into my mind. It said, more or less, "make a CD for a friend, copy childrens' stories to a CD for the little ones in your life".

So prisons, and convalescent homes came to my mind. In prisons there are probably many people who never got a chance to learn to read very well, and in convalescent homes and such, there are many people who, due to failing eyesight or illness, are no longer able to read.

There is an organization that is nation-wide called Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly, which has a chapter here in San Francisco. They visit and do things for home-bound low-income seniors. I was envisioning suggesting they create, or get help creating, a library of CDs from Librivox recordings, to loan out to the seniors, who hopefully would have something to play them on.
The same thing might work in a prison.

Is there a discussion thread on this already?

Anna Maria

[ceastman]

Not as such, though I'm thinking we need a new category of volunteer: burners. There are two threads on similar ideas:

- sending CDs to troops overseas:
Send CDs to the Troops via AnySoldier.com

- sending CDs to libraries in New Orleans:
Volunteer CD covers? -- the idea doesn't come up till about page 3 in the thread.

I think your idea is a good one. If this whole "sending CDs to nonprofit organizations" gets going in a big way, I'm thinking we might want to put together, say, a 10- or 20-CD compilation of samples - short stories, poetry, one book - as a publicity thing to send off to places as a kind of introduction. Then the individual places could download/burn as they wanted.

But.. just random thoughts.

-Catharine

[kri]

Catharine that's a great idea. I'm thinking that since this has cropped up so many times, it would be great to have someone to take charge of this project. I'm thinking mainly that it would be helpful to have someone familiar with the logistics of what books to make, what people we're already sending to to direct new volunteers, packaging ideas, and in general someone who has all the resources at their disposal to give to interested volunteers. I guess what I mean is less someone to make decisions, and more someone to guide something like this into a regular LV project.

Does anyone want to take this under their wing? I'm not entirely sure what this would entail, but I think we should try to work these "let's send CDs to ---" more centralized.

[tina]

I can't really take on the whole project, but I started a wiki page here

[Anna Maria]

I really like the idea of the compilation, Catharine - sort of a "starter kit", and it would be good publicity.
I will check out Tina's page too.

[tina]

I'm going to take on the research about how to get audiobooks into prisons here in the UK.

Jonathan Aitken is a former cabinet minister and prisoner. This is an edited extract from his new book, 'Porridge and Passion': "We need to tackle three main practical areas crying out for reform - literacy, work and drugs. Illiteracy and subliteracy are major ingredients in reoffending. One third of all Britain's prisoners cannot read or write at all. How can any of them hope to earn an honest living on their release if they cannot even read labels in a warehouse or notices in a factory? The same must be partly true for the next third of all prisoners, whose literacy levels are below the level of 11-year-old schoolchildren."

Audiobooks could be an important tool, both in making books less threatening to those with literacy problems, and perhaps as a learning tool, as they can read along in the text as they listen. I'll keep the wiki page updated as and when I find any organizations who can provide the logistical link to the prisons.

[tina]

I've been sending emails to organizations involved in prison education in the UK and got a reply that said (in part) "we wondered if you would like us to promote you in our e-news, which gets emailed to all the heads of learning and skills in prisons, who may in turn be able to pass it on to prison librarians?"

I said YES of course!

She also asked about the possibility of having volunteers record some of the organizations own literature, which is a bit outside the scope of LV. I told her I would try and recruit volunteers on an ad hoc basis. (Although if it should turn out to be a large endeavor, I would not want it to absorb LV resources and would consider branching it off onto a separate site.)

[earthcalling]

Tina,

I'd be very happy to help out with this.

David

[Stephan]

To get many volunteers going as "burners"/CD-mailers fast, we could create so called ISO images of CDs in raw data format, 700mb large, which pretty much every CD burning software could then burn as CDs.
Offered as a download the ISO-images would enable everyone to become a "burner" of the same CD, with the exact same data, on his CD-Writer. This would also ensure quality as the ISO-images would be a fix thing - the same for everyone.

Some of the common uses include the distribution of operating systems, such as Linux or BSD systems...

Most CD/DVD authoring utilities can deal with ISO images: Producing them ... by ... generating new ones from existing files, or using them to create a copy on physical media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image

[kri]

We talked about this before Stephan, but what about downloading the ISO file? They're quite large.

[mtiernan]

I hate to stick my nose into this. (Just one more thing for me to spend time on.)

The last question, eight years ago, asked about downloading the ISO files. The perfect method for distribution of them is bittorrent. Anyone who's saavy enough to burn CDs on a regular basis could set up a BT client and collect the files for burning. (Which is sorta why I'm here.)

[RuthieG]

We produce all our audio files in MP3 format, so anyone wishing to produce ISO files would have to download and convert the MP3 files to .WAV first, and find somewhere where the ISO could be uploaded and available to download, whether by torrent or in another way. The files would be absolutely huge - some of our audiobooks run to 1GB, and WAV files are about 6 times as big as 128kbps MP3s: an audiobook in CD format would require multiple CDs. I imagine that this is why it never got off the ground .

Ruth