Boston University Office of Disability Services
DAISY Production Training Module

Table of Contents [sitemap]

The Workspace The Office of Disability Services E-Text Production Workspace is located in Room 251 of Disability Services. This space houses three workstations and a high-speed duplex scanner used in the production of DAISY Talking Books. It also serves as storage for everything from hardcopy textbooks to finished DAISY books. Production Workstation #1 is a Dell xxxxx with Pentium 4-NT Processor, 2GB of RAM, Dual Harddrives [80GB Production/160GB Storage] with Dual 19" Monitors and an external 250GB drive for storage. This workstation is used primarily for DAISY production and scanning but can also be used for Optical Character Recogition processing and PDF production. It also houses the main storage for all of our work.

Production Workstations #2 and #3 are both Dell xxxxx with Pentium 4-NT Processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB Harddrives with single 19" Monitors. #2 is used primarily Optical Character Recogition processing and PDF production but also serves as the secondary DAISY production unit and for testing completed materials. #3 is used for training students on how to use DTB's. It is also used for trying out new software and production techniques.

A variety of software products is used in the creation of DAISY books. You will learn to use each of these for specific tasks.

	Adobe Acrobat Standard [v7.0] is used to prepare scanned documents for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) production. Some software programs used by students with print impairments can read directly from PDF documents. We maintain a PDF version of every scanned textbook.
	Abbyy FineReader [v8.0] is Optical Character Recognition software used to extract text from PDF documents and convert them into machine-editable text for digital text production. FineReader is especially used to clean-up documents prior to the OCR process.
	Dolphin EasePublisher is a unique authoring tool which allows fully accessible, multimedia content to be created. It uses the internationally recognised DAISY standard and is the money-shot of the software we use.
	Dolphin Producer is for the creation of fully synchronized text and audio DAISY books from Microsoft-Word documents. We use this for small projects (up to 50 pages) and items needing a fast turnaround time.
	Abbyy PDF Transformer is used when a file needs some special tweaking. You will not be using this as often as som eof the othe rprograms but it is still handy to have in the toolbox.

A Note on Hard Copies of Textbooks

The hard copies of the textbooks we are working with are on hand and available for use. Use them to keep track of where you are, mark up the pages, make notes as necessary.

This is also especially important as you may not have time to finish an assignment and another other staff member picking up the work will have to know where you left off. The sticky notes, pens, paperclips, etc. are in the workspace to be used.

These hard copies will not be returned to the bookstore and are a valuable tool – use them!