Web service for connecting visually impaired people with libraries

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a case study of developing a web service that will act as an intermediary between the Audio Library system for the visually impaired and the library management systems. The Audio Library is based on speech recognition and text-to-speech engines and it produces synthesized speech from various electronic materials. It has its own database with a limited number of books and textual materials. Web services described in this paper should enable access to a larger number of electronic resources provided by libraries. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the author specified software architecture of a web service analyzing different approaches for search and retrieval. Findings – Web service described in this paper is the first software solution addressing the problem of lending e-books in Serbia. It aggregates collections of different libraries in a single access point for the Audio Library system. In this way, users of the Audio Library system are provided with larger number of electronic resources. Originality/value – Communication between the Audio Library and this web service is achieved by using standardized protocols for exchanging library data. However, those protocols did not fulfill all necessary requirements, so the authors propose some extensions to overcome those issues.