Movies for visually impaired in China; School students create videos wlic2017

This is the second liveblog report on the session Media is the Message: Critical Use of Video in the Digital Age at the 2017 World Library and Information Conference in Wroclaw, Poland

Watching Movies Through Listening at Any Place in Any Time - A Special Event for Visually Impaired People from Jian-hao He (Taipei Public Library, Taiwan, Republic of China), Shih-chang Horng (Taipei Public Library, Taiwan, Republic of China). The first speaker started by identifying the large size of the city of Taipei (2.7 million). The have one branch (Qiming) devoted to visually impaired people and have a large collection of braille and audio books. They have a free e-library, free newspaper reading, and a pay-for-use hotline about activities. When it comes to movies, obviously a lot of what movies convey is through visual means. Therefore they have programme to make videos accessible to the visually impaired. An example was shown, in which a video was being shown and there was a describer saying what the people were saying and also saying what was happening in the movie. The process of being a describer at a live event was described. Ther describer had to watch the movie many times and take notes, beforehand, and write an introduction. A braille leaflet is then produced by the library. At the live event, the describer gives an introduction before the movie and add a simultaneous description, and finally the participants can discuss the movie. A recording is made, and the editor of the recording is visually impaired so that he has good understanding of people's needs. They have 540 movies so far, with 31,000 downloads. The full paper is here: http://library.ifla.org/1771/1/242-he-en.pdf

Advocacy Through Videos: Short Movies on School Libraries from Isabel Mendinhos (School Libraries Network, Portugal). She is on the far left of the photo, which shows most of the panel members. She talked about a 2016 project to increase awareness of the good work undertaken in school libraries. The School Library Network in Portugal has 45 regional coordinators and 1400 teacher librarians, and there are also local networks which undertake training etc. Clusters of schools can carry out projects to become part of the network (I think).
The network launched a campaign to get testimonials about the SLN, to celebrate 20 years of growth, and the idea was to get school students to create videos on school libraries. There were rules about the length of the video, legal and ethical permissions etc. The librarians explained these to students. The videos were put on Facebook or Youtube and sent to the SLN, to eventually be put on their Facebook page. The videos that got the most FB likes went onto the SLN anniversary page. 130 videos were submitted, involving 1000 students. The SLN published rankings (by likes) on their blog.
The participants enjoyed the exercise, and they had to use critical and creative skills, mostly through collaboration. They could also think about the impact and use of social media. Also, for the school libraries, the videos provide an excellent testament to the value of school libraries. The full paper is here: http://library.ifla.org/1772/1/242-mendinhos-en.pdf There is also an article in English with video examples here https://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/latest/news/20-years-of-enhancing-literacy.htm