[Music]
Good morning everyone can you all hear me? I'm not
used to talking a little bit loud. Is that
good? Okay. I talked loud so I may
not need a mic and good morning welcome. I'm
Pam Vickers. I am the university's Americans with Disabilities
Act Coordinator here at Virginia Tech. Thank you all
for coming out. We greatly appreciate it and I
know you're going to enjoy the exhibit today. October is
National Disability Employment Awareness month or NADEAM for short as
we call it. It is a national campaign that
raises awareness about disability employment issues and also celebrates the
many and varied gifts and contributions that individuals with disabilities
make to our workplace and to our classrooms. This
year's theme is my disability is one part of who
I am. NADEAM's roots go back to 1945 when
Congress enacted a law declaring the first week in October
each year as national employed the physically handicapped week.
Now you have to remember that, that's when our
troops were coming home from World War Two and there
were a lot of veterans with physical disabilities and we
use the handicapped word then. Then In 1962, the
word physically was removed to acknowledge the employment needs and
contributions of individuals with all types of disabilities. In 1988,
Congress expanded the week to a month and changed
the name to national disability employment awareness month. In 2001
with the formation of the Office of Disability Employment Policy
that agency assumed responsibility for NADEAM and has since
worked to expand its reach and scope. Each year
in october University A. D. A. Services
hosts a celebratory event in honor of NADEAM. This
year we were very fortunate because we partnered with University
Libraries in order to bring the Allies for Inclusion:
The Ability Exhibit to the Virginia Tech campus. And
it will be here from today through October seven. Mike
is going to talk about that in a few minutes
so I won't steal his thunder, but it is
a wonderful interactive exhibit. We will kick that off
today and we are, I just can't say thank
you Tyler enough and thank you to the committee. As
we think about education and employment, how important how
intertwined and related they are, let us be mindful
of the need to ensure that opportunities are available and
accessible for individuals with disabilities to learn, achieve and succeed
at this time. I would like to introduce Tyler
Walters, Dean of University Libraries. Mhm. Thank
you, Pam. I appreciate the remarks. Thank you
all for coming this morning. We're very happy to
be partnering on this exhibit with our universities A.D.A Services
office. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how
why the library. But first I wanted to
to just mention that we all know somebody who has
some form of disability. I'm quite certain of that.
And I was even this morning, I was
spent a lot of time this morning walking through here
and read all the placards did some of the interactive
stuff and I saw a placard that Mention that
over 38% of those in America with disabilities are high
school dropouts. It made me think of my own
family where I have three daughters with various disabilities.
I have a daughter who actually fell at eight months
old and she had a head and brain trauma.
She's doing very nicely now. She's a college graduate.
It took her a couple of years come around
and I have a daughter with ADHD and dyslexia
and a third daughter with ADHD
So makes life fun and interesting at times.
They're all in college, one's a college graduate.
The other two are in college, so I'm
very proud of them. And so we had that
kind of experience in our own, in our own
family. So about libraries and why why accessibility and
libraries. I actually had a kind of a hard time
coming up with comments about this, and the reason
why is because it is just so ingrained in our
ethos, it's just something libraries as an institution.
I don't want to say we take it for granted,
but it is just something we do. There
are there's federal funding, their state level funding, the Department
of Ed uh there's the Institute of Museum and Library
Services which is a federal agency who fund aspects of
making making websites accessible, making buildings accessible. So
we really feel that this is this is who we
are. This is what we do. We serve
everybody. We're here, libraries exist to create a
level playing field if you if you will for everybody
to learn to gain access to information and data and
access libraries, research and learning services. Were we
really do this regardless of gender regardless of status of
any kind, sexual orientation, gender. Uh if
you're economically disadvantage, if you're veteran, etcetera,
uh, what we see is people who need support
in learning and it is our job to help level
that, That playing field on a more of a,
you know, boots on the ground basis.
There are plenty of things we're doing. We work,
we work with uh, A.D.A. services office,
uh, talking about some of our videos and websites.
We talk a lot about the building and have
made improvements over recent years. We're still working on
that, but we work a lot with a day
services and the facilities and we think about these kinds
of things. So it's very, very important to
us, You know, really, as university wide
service serving 31,000 students and many faculty and students don't
even all the numbers start to blur. It's a
big, it's a big responsibility in a daunting task
in a lot of ways. And libraries are really
viewed as, you know, this is the service
that's supposed to be kind of everything to anybody in
terms of being within a learning community. And we
do we take that seriously that we really want to
support the notion of accessibility and inclusion within our community.
So this is kind of the I think this
is really the main value we hold. In fact,
when I arrived here and I had read the
principle of community um at Virginia Tech, I kind
of read it and frankly panic well, duh,
you know, these are, these are important.
And I thought well, but you know, librarians
are gonna react that way because many of us have
been on the front lines, have been on the
service desk. This is this is something we're trained
for, we think about and we're always looking for
ways to kind of improve, improve the ways that
we can activate this value that we have and just
improve the learning abilities of our community. So a
few things I thought I'd also tell you a bit
about what that's fine. Tyler, what is the
library really do in this area? So I thought
I'd just talk a little bit about some of the
things that we're doing. Uh we're continuously looking at
what else we need to do. We learn a
lot through these kinds of things to through our we
have a library student advisory board and I have a
dean's advisory committee of faculty and we do talk about
these kinds of topics and we particularly get feedback from
students on accessibility issues. So it's very, very
helpful to us in recent times. We've been focusing
a lot on um kind of online learning developing learning
content that students and faculty. Uh usually students use
uh faculty, we build it with faculty. Uh
we have a few people work in this area.
We call it our online learning group And they're working
towards really making all of our learning materials, all
of our online videos being accessible. 100% that these
would include transcripts as well as captioning. I prefer
being viewed and really was kind of ramping up with
that Miss Day and age. It's actually kind of
nice because we don't have to convert a lot of
materials. And just as we're creating them, we
take these things into consideration and we develop things this
way along with that there will be kind of assessment
program for for this for the accessibility requirements. And
to make sure that we're doing our job in that
regard. Again, those of us who who have
grants, especially from federal agencies are were looked to
do provide and meet certain requirements and guidelines. So
we're actually very happy to do that. We realized
we needed a kind of an assessment program with us
as we as we go forward. Of course,
those of you who know us, we work with
the assistive technologies folks, the lab, there's there's
an office downstairs right below us. It's the closest
area to our Xs on the outside by the cafe
are our ramp which is the easiest way to get
in. You can also get on this door here
. But the first floor is more convenient. We
meet with them and talk with them about what we
can do. They have ideas for us at times
. So it's been very good. And some of
even some of our what I call kind of bread
and butter services kind of have this accessibility bent to
it. Things like inter library loan and document delivery
. We do this today electronically and we kind of
take it for granted. But when we deliver articles
electronically, it means that the receiver, the person
can can take that text and do what they need
with that they can enlarge it, they can brighten
it, et cetera for reading if your if your
sight challenged, we learned all sorts of equipment and
the same same kinds of considerations are made there.
We also for her mobility challenged people, we have
what we call the book runners service. So we
it's not just it's for everybody, all faculty at
least. But there are plenty of folks I know
who find it difficult to get to the building and
if they can check out a book online and we
will bring it to their academic department. So we
realized that this was this was helpful. We also
have a major partner in the Hottie Trust Digital Library
which is all of the Google Books, scans was
10 million books in this digital library. Some of
them are available, but within the copyright law,
there is a provision that allows allows educational institutions to
share print materials directly. Uh kind of a scanned
pdf for people with print disabilities. This would not
normally be the case. Basically copyright, you can't
just share everything you want to, you can't send
it to everybody. That's a copyright violation. So
in other words, the hottie trusted your library holds
a lot of stuff that's in copyright. A small
portion that's in public domain is open. But the
copyrighted material can be freely shared with those who have
a print disability. So that's another way that we
help with with the Virginia tech community in that way
. And the High Trust library itself has, has
worked hard to be able to provide that kind of
service. And that's a recent thing for us.
So again, we're very interested in feedback. We
really want you to enjoy the exhibit today and for
the week, please tell other people about the exhibit
. We want them to come and take a look
. We figure maybe it'll be a few early semester
weary students this weekend who will want to take a
break and come down off the fourth floor and maybe
walk around and take a look and get refreshed.
So I think that will be helpful. So I'm
gonna end there. But I'm gonna we're gonna have
mike cut nap. Talk more about the exhibit itself
. Yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Mike
back. I am the campus 80. A specialist
. I work with Pam and University a day services
. And this exhibit is actually produced by some colleagues
of mine at ST Louis University. It started off
as a class project. A graduate student in the
higher education program at ST Louis University came up with
this idea as part of their project and her professor
, Dr Karen Myers, she teaches a class at
Saint Louis University called disability in Higher ed and society
. And as part of this class, um students
were required to come up with the end of the
semester project. And so one student came up with
this idea about an exhibit explaining how you can be
an ally for someone with a disability. And dr
Myers was so impressed by what the student came up
with that she formed a team to enhance it and
enlarge it. And in 2010, the allies for
inclusion, the ability exhibit debuted at ST Louis University
for the 20th anniversary of the signing of the So
we are fortunate that we are in the 25th anniversary
of the signing of the A. D. A
. And we have been able to bring it to
campus for the first time. Uh This is a
traveling exhibit that has appeared in multiple countries around the
world at multiple different colleges and universities and educational conferences
. Uh It's won several awards. It's very interactive
and very fun. If you guys haven't had a
chance to go through it yet. I've seen it
at several other conferences and it's a fabulous exhibit.
So I hope all of you enjoy it. Um
and if you have any questions about it, please
let us know. We're happy to talk to you
about all of the different things you see there.
And finally today we are going to hear from Janet
oil. She is the co chair of the library's
diversity committee. She has a few words for us
. Okay, good morning. Um welcome to the
opening of the Allies for Inclusion exhibit. I just
wanted to take a few minutes to recognize the many
people who helped make this collaboration successful. It was
our pleasure to accept pam's invitation to help with this
event to celebrate national disability employment awareness month, pam
and Mike of University 80 A services conceived the plan
, communicated with ST louis University to bring the exhibit
here and they've worked with us as a team throughout
the whole process. Lauren F Henderson, Communications Director
for Administrative Services, helped get the word out with
a web page and public media. This event would
not have been possible without the generous support of Dr
Tyler Walters, Dean of Libraries. He provided financial
support the event space and access to the talented people
who work in the library. Thank you to the
creative services team for graphic design, invitations, social
media, photography and video. Um led by Elizabeth
Gibbons. The team includes kim Kimberly Basler brian craig
and Liz McCoy scott frail in our exhibit specialist is
responsible for coordinating the physical space and the construction of
the exhibit and max off PSA. Assistant facilities manager
helped arrange the space. Sita Williams is the special
events coordinator and she is responsible for the beautiful reception
and refreshment table. She also coordinates the student service
team who will help maintain the exhibit throughout the week
. And finally, our all purpose volunteers from the
University libraries diversity council, Kimberly weeks Ron Bickham and
charlotte. Gilbert now charlotte, also the inclusive VT
coordinator for the libraries and she was key in helping
us communicate with the Dean throughout the planet to highlight
some of the ways that the university community provides services
. We are displaying posters during the exhibit right along
here at noon On the closing day, Wednesday october
7th the posters, presenters will be here to answer
questions. Posters are submitted by Mike Cut Knack of
88 services, Stephanie Guevara of the library circulation staff
and Daniel Farrell, project director of Virginia Tech on
campus transition program. Now, Daniel is an employee
of Montgomery County public schools but he conducts his program
for students with disabilities here in human library. Um
in addition on Wednesday at noon. How brackett Director
of accessibility and university universal design. We'll demonstrate,
read and write gold. It's a communication software tool
that converts text to speech and speech to text and
much more. And that demonstration will take place in
room 207 a, which is right around the corner
here. Um, so hopefully some of you can
come back on Wednesday and see this demonstration. So
thank you to all of our contributors. I'm here
. He's living. And when you get to the
final station, I hope you'll sign the pledge to
be an ally for inclusion. Mhm. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Thank you all. Now we
can go to the exhibit. It is interactive.
Please enjoy if you'd rather eat first. That's fine
too. The food's great. Thank you. See
that. It's beautiful to take some pictures of that
. Thank you, charlotte Janna. The committee is
we have worked for months to get this together to
bring it to campus and we really enjoyed it.
Thank you. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm, mm
hmm. Mhm. Mhm, mm hmm. Yeah
. And mm hmm. Yeah. Mm. Yeah
. Mm. Okay. Mhm.