In the summer, GOAT started cataloguing and scanning a box from the archives of assistive tech DIY booklets, papers, and books donated to the organization. We have an initial “pilot” box of materials to work with, going through each item and filling out a short printed worksheet by hand to describe some of its meta information, including:
- author(s) if they are not clear
- general subject
- a selection of tags, with free tagging if needed
- uniqueness, via WorldCat, Internet Archive, and other searches
Our first intern, Jack Kulkulski, got a crash course in disability justice, assistive tech, intellectual property, open software licensing and hardware licensing, copyleft, and more. For now, items are catalogued on LibraryThing, as it is affordable, has a flexible interface, and an API so we can later query it for searches and display items from it on the GOAT website.
We have made some preliminary scans of stapled or unbound material that could be easily disassembled and then put together again. Documents are scanned to PDF, OCR-ed, and converted to other file formats. We will likely be uploading much of the older, unique material to the Internet Archive.
For example, this short booklet, “Application and Construction Notes for Laptrays and Adaptive Pointers [microform] : Wobble Stick Toy Control, Adaptive Pointers, Slide-Away Laptray, Swing-Away Lapboard and Folding Communication Board”. It’s packed with useful looking diagrams and instructions to make trays, communication boards, and adaptive pointers that attach to wheelchairs or elsewhere. It is difficult to find, though you can view it on microfiche at the University of Colorado and maybe could order it from ERIC. We have catalogued it (very amateurly; not as real library cataloguers would do) at LibraryThing in the openassistivetech.org collection. The full text of the scan will be uploaded soon.
Here’s our intern hard at work assessing materials from Box A of the archives:
These boxes of materials for cataloguing and scanning were generously donated by DIY assistive tech expert Alexandra Enders. I’ll write more about Alexandra in a future post!
The eventual home will be at a very interesting, privately owned public institution: the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, so that anyone who wants to look at the physical papers and books will be able to use them.
