A little way from the entrance you can hear it. The blackbird.
Its song is loud and defiant, even though it’s the middle of winter. The sound becomes stronger the nearer you get to the large, dark doors. The birdsong is there to guide people with visual impairments to the large Iiris Centre near Östra Centrum on the edge of Helsinki. This houses a number of different organisations and businesses that are related in various ways to those with visual impairments.
Also here is the Celia Library – a State-owned specialist library that produces and distributes literature in an accessible format for those including people with visual impairments and those with reading and learning difficulties.
30 per cent of all fiction in Finland
Celia offers its customers the facility to borrow, free of charge, talking books, books in Braille, e-books and books that combine text and sound. Every year the library produces around 30 per cent of all fiction and non-fiction that is published in Finland in an accessible format. This makes Celia the biggest producer of alternative media in Finland. Celia also produces and sells text books in an accessible format for compulsory and upper secondary schools. In total they have around 16,000 customers, who between them borrow one million items a year.
“We don’t have such large volumes, but there are many practical details that must all work,” says Minna von Zansen, Service Manager at Celia.
Most of Celia’s borrowers are members of a book club and automatically receive a selection delivered to their home every month. They can be anything from whodunits to historical novels or memoirs. Only around thirteen per cent of users seek out books for themselves and actively borrow online.
“We have borrowers all over Finland, but also in other countries. Some are even as far away as Australia.”
Celia also produces books in other languages.
“After all, we’re bilingual in Finland, so we collaborate with the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille. We also produce books in languages other than Swedish.”
Speedy delivery if the book’s in stock
The borrower can order books via Celia’s online service. They can also do it over the phone. A total of one million personalised talking books are sent out on CD every year. The talking books, which conform to the international Daisy standard, offer much better navigation options than a normal audio book.
“If we have the book that the borrower’s looking for, we burn the CD the next night. If we don’t have it, it takes about two months to record it,” explains Minna von Zansen.
The CDs are collected from Celia every day. They are packed by Stralfors in special cardboard sleeves and then sent out in the post. Within the framework of the agreement, Celia has outsourced its envelope-filling machines. These are at Stralfors’ premises.
Minna von Zansen points out that this is a one-way distribution system. Borrowers do not have to return the CDs once the loan period has expired.
“Demanding the CDs be returned would take up too many resources. And recycling is an environmentally preferable alternative to one more transport operation.”
Cheaper thanks to robots
Since packing was moved to Stralfors, the manual handling of CDs has
been reduced.
“It means that we can use cheaper, less scratch-resistant CDs than the expensive, waxed CDs that we used to use. It’s also better for the robots that burn our CDs, as we avoid waxy deposits,” says Minna von Zansen.
“This was a totally new process for us, but after a short period of adjustment the partnership’s working very well,” explains Peter Stenvall, sales representative for Stralfors in Finland.
At Celia they have been working for a couple of years on an online solution using Daisy technology.
“The borrower has a Daisy player at home, which is connected directly to the Internet. At the moment this is a pilot project involving about 200 customers.
“But CDs won’t be disappearing for some time yet. They’ll be with us at least until 2018,” believes Minna von Zansen.
“Last year we had 2,800 new customers. Most of them want to borrow CDs. Despite everything, it’s the simplest option as we have lots of older borrowers who aren’t comfortable with new technology,” she says.
In addition to the Daisy solution, Celia also offers streaming reading on the computer. But this requires a special software program, which Celia offers to its customers free of charge.