The theme for this week's South African Library Week is "Celebrating libraries in 20 years of democracy: check in @ your library". To celebrate our many local libraries, Grocott's reporter Sarah Kingon has covered the work of a selection of them.
The theme for this week's South African Library Week is "Celebrating libraries in 20 years of democracy: check in @ your library". To celebrate our many local libraries, Grocott's reporter Sarah Kingon has covered the work of a selection of them.
Below is a report on developments at the South African Library for the Blind (SALB).
While the wheels of South Africa's decades-old copyright laws slowly turn, an intellectual property rights group has ensured that visually impaired people (VIPs) have thousands of titles to read.
The Accessible Book Consortium, an umbrella body of the World Intellectual Property Association, has established an international catalogue of accessible reading material which allows libraries for the blind to share up to 300 000 titles.
This follows the signing of a treaty in Marrakesh, Morocco, to bring an end to what has come to be known as “book apartheid.”
The treaty makes it mandatory for countries to initiate a standard set of limitations and exceptions to copyright rules for formats designed for VIPs, and allow for exchange of those formats across borders.
A South African delegation signed the treaty, but nothing has changed since then.
Francois Hendrikz, director at SALB, said the treaty will take years to be ratified and introduced into South African legislation.
“There is a political and legal process that needs to be followed and this process is now delayed due to the upcoming elections,” he said.
Currently only 5% of reading material in South Africa is available to visually impaired people, due to limitations in copyright laws.
This means that this already marginalised group faces lower literacy rates and fewer educational and employment opportunities.
According to Hendriks, the existing copyright legislation in South Africa has not been revised in the last 30 years.
“We can’t wait for the legal processes to come through before we see change. This catalogue allows titles from around the world to be made available for download within a few hours instead of waiting for months for print,” said Hendriks.
There is no quality control and production process as part of this exchange.
Instead, the library fine-tunes the process themselves, meaning no extra time delays or costs incurred to the person requesting a book, he said.
This year, SALB celebrates its 95th year of servicing one of the country’s most under-resourced groups.
During the course of the year it has lined up a number of events focused on raising awareness for the library and its members, and on giving back to the Grahamstown community.
Library representatives will also be attending the South African Book Fair in June this year.
“Sighted people aren’t aware of the library and the fact that it is also a publisher. This promises to be a brilliant opportunity to publicise the library and the work it does," said Hendrikz.
Artwork of VIPs from all over South Africa will also be exhibited at the National Arts Festival this year.
The library is currently appealing to VIPs to share their artwork for the display, themed ‘The place where I live.’
During the Annual Library Association Conference, scheduled for October, the library will be presenting a workshop on service delivery to blind people .
“We will be exhibiting our products and services at the conference, as well as working to highlight the treaty issue in terms of the limited number of books available (locally) for blind people,” said Hendrikz.
