Good news for patrons of the Indiana Talking Book and Braille Library. Locally recorded books from the Indiana Voices program are now available to download from BARD, the National Library Service’s Braille and Audio Reading Download website. While we have been eagerly anticipating the day when we could start adding our locally recorded books to BARD for several years now, we first had to go through a pilot process so that we could fulfill all of the required criteria.

We were invited to participate in the BARD pilot program in November and completed it in January.  Early in February we uploaded “Brewster’s Millions” by Indiana author George Barr McCutcheon, to BARD. In its first month on BARD it was downloaded over 200 times by people all over the country!

Over the next few months we will be working on making the necessary formatting changes to more books in the Indiana Voices collection so they too can be added and freely enjoyed by Talking Book patrons all over the country. Upcoming Indiana titles to look for on BARD include biographies of Richard Lugar and Frank O’Bannon as well as the classic Indiana novel “Uncle Tom Andy Bill” (a personal favorite).

This blog post was written by Margaret Ansty, Talking Book & Braille Library Supervisor, Indiana State Library. For more information, contact the Indiana State Library at (317)232-3684 or “Ask-A-Librarian” at http://www.in.gov/library/ask.htm.