“Currently there are 6,280 audiobooks at the National Library. We will increase it 15,000 by the end of the Iranian year,” Shahrabi told IBNA. As he said so far there are about 15,000 audio book titles available across the country and the library intends to have all of them in its collection.
“Most of the books in CD format do not last long, so we retrieved their contents and made them available on a network called SAM,” he added.
The present collection of the audiobooks at the library comes from institutions and organizations where they are produced.
Based on a request from the National Library, one copy of each edition is sent to the library.
Payam-e-Noor University, its 31 provincial centers and Roudaki Foundation, which is the owner of some major cultural venues in Tehran, are cooperating with the National Library in completion of the audiobook collection.
“Almost half of the audio books available in Iran are educational and largely in the fields of human sciences,” Shahrabi said.
The National Library has dedicated one of its halls to the blind people. “They can access 70,000 dissertations in most academic majors … Dissertations are read by a software.”The library has 1,500 book titles in Braille and is going to increase the number in tandem with the audio books.
Source: Financial Tribune