9 things Keninger will be remembered for
Expanding the NLS foreign-language collection
NLS in American Libraries magazine
"Happy I took the chance"
Karen Keninger is retiring after a lifetime of service to people with print disabilities
By Claire Rojstaczer
When she was hired as NLS director in 2012, Karen Keninger recalls, “I thought, because I had run a network library and been a patron, that I knew everything.”
Nine years later, she laughs at her naiveté. “[Acting director Ruth Scovill] told me that I had a very steep learning curve ahead of me, and I thought, ‘How could that be?’ But she was absolutely right.”
Now, as she looks toward retirement later this spring, Keninger credits “a tremendous, dedicated staff”—and her own passion for the work—with helping her meet the challenges of the job.
The braille eReader currently in pilot testing was one of those passions. “It was a dream of mine,” Keninger says. “I said nine years ago, if I could make that happen, I could retire happily. I have the privilege of having access to refreshable braille because of my job, but a lot of people can’t afford thousands of dollars for devices. And I knew the only institution with the capacity to solve the problem was NLS.”
Making that a reality was a long process. “We knew, intuitively, that this was what people wanted, but we needed them to say it, so we could base our decisions on data,” Keninger explains.
The result: the 2013 Braille Summit, sponsored by NLS and the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, which brought together users and technical experts. “That helped us explain why it was important when trying to raise congressional interest,” she says. NLS also hired a consulting firm to document the cost savings of moving to fully digital braille and received support from a 2016 Government Accountability Office study of NLS operations. The final outcome was the legislative changes necessary for NLS to provide refreshable braille displays.
“When the prose is beautiful, when you want to savor it at your own speed, braille is the best way to do that,” Keninger says.
But that doesn’t mean NLS has neglected audio under her tenure. Contracts with commercial audiobook publishers, opening the Braille and Audio Reading Download (BARD) website to books recorded by cooperating libraries, and the Marrakesh Treaty—which facilitates the exchange of books in accessible formats among more than 80 countries—have expanded the NLS audio collection.
Meanwhile, the BARD Mobile app, which makes more than 100,000 audio and ebraille books on BARD available to patrons with smart devices, and Duplication on Demand, which allows network libraries to put multiple audio books on a single digital cartridge, have both streamlined patron access.
“My participation in [the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions] was very beneficial in understanding what other countries had been doing,” Keninger explains. “Even before the United States joined the Marrakesh Treaty, I was able to work at developing initial concepts for how to standardize cataloging and make international exchange possible.”
She notes that different countries use different digital recording standards, requiring a conversion process when NLS adds books recorded in, for example, Russia to its collection, or vice versa. “This is not a free lunch. There’s a fair amount of technical work that goes into trading international books. But when I started, every time I went to an international conference, the Canadian rep would say, ‘When can we have your books?’ Well, they can have them now.”
Seeing so many of her goals for NLS become reality makes this a satisfying time for retirement. “It’s been a tremendous place to work, and I’m happy—very happy—I took the chance,” Keninger says. But she is confident that others are ready to continue the initiatives she began.
She’s also pleased that NLS has begun a new internship program for blind students. As the program’s first blind director, Keninger says, “my perspective and connections to the community have been important to build community buy-in.” She hopes NLS will welcome other blind leaders in its future.
Meanwhile, Keninger says, “I’m just looking forward to finally having time to read!” She loves travelogues, and mentions Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China (available to NLS patrons as BR07553 and DB27010) as a recent pleasure. When she’s not reading, she’s writing her own travel stories and ponders someday writing a book.
The pandemic has limited her travel, but as soon as it’s over, she says, “The first place we’re going to go is Ireland—unless it’s Portugal. Or maybe both!”
In the meantime, she’s taking joy in her home near Newton, Iowa. The Library of Congress’s liberal telework policy during the pandemic allows her to manage NLS from afar during these final months of her tenure. Keninger grew up in Iowa and was director of the Iowa Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped from 2000 to 2008 and director of the Iowa Department for the Blind from 2008 to 2012. She designed her house twenty years ago, complete with a sunny office built exactly to her specifications, and is glad to be back after renting it out during her tenure in DC. “While the pandemic keeps me at home, I want to treat these eight acres that I live in as a travel experience and write about that,” she says.
Her guide dog Jimi is enjoying those eight acres, too. His first trip as a working dog was when Keninger visited Washington, D.C., for her job interview, so it’s fitting that with her retirement, Jimi’s career is ending as well.
“He isn’t officially retired, but for all intents and purposes he is, because we’re not going anywhere,” Keninger says. “He’s loving it. He loves the bigger house and playing in the snow. I’ll be getting a new dog in the spring, but there’s plenty of room and Jimi will stay here, too.”
9 things Karen Keninger will be remembered for at NLS
Her advocacy for braille. “All too often people who lose their vision as children are steered away from literacy into a completely aural—that is, listening—approach, an approach that was abandoned by most world cultures long ago,” Keninger said in a 2016 presentation to librarians from around the world who serve people with print disabilities. “And people who lose their vision as adults give up their literacy, thinking that they have no alternative but to move into a completely aural information environment. Braille is that alternative. Braille is a complete and accessible system for reading, comparable in nearly every way to print.”
As part of that advocacy, Keninger spearheaded a 2013 symposium with the Perkins School for the Blind, “The Future of Braille,” to solicit ideas on ways libraries can promote and support braille literacy.
The braille eReader. A longtime goal of NLS, and Keninger, has been to provide a device to patrons who read braille but can’t afford expensive commercial refreshable braille displays. A 2015 amendment to its authorizing legislation cleared the way for NLS to begin developing a refreshable braille display, or eReader, for its patrons. NLS is pilot testing two models of the eReader for future distribution.
BARD improvements and expansion. BARD went online a couple of years before Keninger came to NLS, but in 2013 NLS made it easier and more convenient for patrons to use with the release of the BARD Mobile app for iOS devices. An app for Android devices followed in 2015. BARD Express for PCs, which simplifies downloading and transferring audio books from BARD to a cartridge or external flash drive for playback in a digital player, came out in 2017. And in January, BARD moved to the cloud, improving capacity and download speeds and positioning the BARD system to support future NLS devices.
Expanding the collection. NLS reached agreements with many commercial audiobook publishers to convert their recordings to NLS digital talking books, giving patrons access to a wider—and more up-to-the-minute—selection of books. BARD also was opened to network-produced audio books that meet NLS standards, making a wide selection of regional titles available to readers all over the country.
Easing access. Just this year, NLS got final approval for changes to its regulatory language to make it easier for people with reading disabilities such as dyslexia to qualify for service.
Marrakesh Treaty. Keninger advocated for US participation in the international treaty, which facilitates the cross-border exchange of books in accessible formats and is expanding NLS’s foreign-language offerings.
International leadership. Keninger was the Marrakesh Treaty liaison for the Libraries Serving Persons with Print Disabilities section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. She has given presentations at symposia in Helsinki, Finland; Zagreb, Croatia; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, among other locales.
A new name. NLS had been the “National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped” since 1978. But in 2019, it changed its named to the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, removing outdated language and communicating more clearly who NLS serves.
Jimi: Keninger was often accompanied by her guide dog, a golden retriever/Labrador retriever mix named Jimi—“like Jimi Hendrix.” His name was sometimes misspelled “Jimmy,” but Keninger assured offenders it didn’t really matter, because “He can’t read.” Jimi usually kept a low profile but occasionally would steal the show with a random bark, yawn or shake.
New librarian's mission: expand the NLS audio and braille foreign-language collection
By Mark Schwartz
Foreign languages have played a big part in Kelsey Corlett-Rivera’s personal and professional life for more than two decades.
So when she saw last year that NLS was looking for a new Foreign Language Librarian, “I knew it was meant to be,” she says.
Now Corlett-Rivera is responsible for expanding NLS’s collection of audio and braille books in Spanish and other languages. As such, she also has a leading role in NLS’s participation in the Marrakesh Treaty, which facilitates the international exchange of books in accessible formats.
As an undergraduate at Harvard University in the early 2000s, Corlett-Rivera majored in Spanish and Italian. She studied and worked abroad in both Chile, where she organized a small non-profit library, and Italy, where she enrolled in the University of Genoa.
“In Genoa,” she recalls, “I frequented a jazz bar where I spoke Italian with my fellow music enthusiasts and Spanish with the Argentine bartender.”
She signed up for a Library of Congress reader’s card while on a summer internship at the State Department. The research she did at the Library—using rare 19th-century foreign-language books on the experiences of Italian immigrants in Chile—helped her complete her senior thesis.
After working as a project manager for a translation company, she decided to attend graduate school for library science. Shortly after arriving at the University of Maryland, she was hired to replace the recently retired foreign language librarian. She handled collection development, reference and instruction for French, Italian and German, adding Spanish and Portuguese when she took a faculty position as the librarian for the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She became Head of Research Commons in 2014, through which she gained extensive program development and partnership-building experience while continuing her subject specialist duties.
She’s come a long way from her first library job, barcoding international law books in the basement of the Harvard Law School library.
Now, at NLS, Corlett-Rivera is thrilled to help blind and print disabled readers access foreign language materials. “I have arrived at NLS during a very exciting time,” she says, “much of it due to the Marrakesh Treaty, which allows NLS and other organizations like NLS to address the accessible book famine around the world.” More than 80 countries have ratified the Marrakesh Treaty, which you can learn more about at https://go.usa.gov/xsbUD.
About 90 percent of the world’s 285 million people who are blind or visually impaired have low incomes and live in developing countries, and less than 7 percent of books published each year are available in an accessible format, Corlett-Rivera says. “These two facts mean that very few people who are blind or visually impaired have access to books that they can read.”
NLS has one of the world’s largest collections of audio and braille books, so sharing it with other countries can really make a difference, she says. And NLS patrons benefit from the addition of a trove of books in foreign languages. Workflows are being finalized to make these new books available on BARD, the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download website.
Corlett-Rivera takes a patron-focused approach to collection development, leveraging census data to identify languages spoken by blind and print disabled people in the US.
“While I expected to see a high percentage of Spanish speakers, I was surprised to learn that we should also be focusing on languages like Tagalog, Haitian Creole, and others, depending on the state,” she says.
With the Marrakesh Treaty, there is more potential than ever before to reach current and future patrons. “As we increase the size of our collections in these languages, we can increase outreach and, long term, increase the number of foreign-language-speaking NLS patrons while better serving our current foreign language speakers,” she says.
NLS eases access for people with reading disabilities
NLS recently made a long-awaited change in its regulatory language that makes it easier for people with reading disabilities to enroll.
The change, which was entered into the Federal Register on February 12 and implemented through NLS network libraries in mid-February, allows reading specialists, educators, librarians and school psychologists to certify the eligibility of applicants with reading disabilities.
NLS has long made its services available to people with reading disabilities. Previously, however, a doctor of medicine or osteopathy was required to certify that an applicant’s reading disability was “the result of organic dysfunction.” This requirement was a high bar for potential patrons.
Before implementing this change, NLS consulted with stakeholders from consumer groups representing its traditional patron base and took the necessary steps to have Congress amend the eligibility language in its authorizing legislation. This was accomplished in the 2018 Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act and the 2019 Library of Congress Technical Corrections Act. The final regulatory step was publication of the new language in the Federal Register.
Find out more about eligibility for NLS services at www.loc.gov/nls/about/eligibility-for-nls-services.
Online concert kicks off NLS's 90th birthday celebration
Matthew Whitaker’s March 3 conference can be streamed from the Library of Congress YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/4X5NhVwLzM4 External.
Learn more about NLS’s 90th anniversary at www.loc.gov/nls.
NLS is celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2021 with curated digital content and features throughout the year and a kick-off concert that took place on March 3, marking the day in 1931 that President Herbert Hoover signed legislation creating a national library service to provide “books for the adult blind.”
The online concert featured jazz pianist and NLS patron Matthew Whitaker and his quartet. The selection of Whitaker, an innovative performer, composer and arranger, was an apt choice at such an important time in NLS’s history, as the organization continues to find new ways to meet the needs of Americans with disabilities.
Whitaker became interested in music as a toddler, taking immediately to the toy piano he was given by his grandfather. At age five, he began training in classical piano and in reading braille music with Dalia Sakas from the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School in New York City, the only community music school for the blind and visually impaired in the United States. In the fall of 2019 Whitaker became the first blind undergraduate student to join Juilliard’s Jazz Studies program.
Whitaker has been featured on 60 Minutes and invited by Stevie Wonder to perform Wonder’s classic “I Wish” for the revival of Showtime at the Apollo. He has been described as “the very essence of a musical prodigy.”
In an interview with Whitaker, NLS Director Karen Keninger mentioned NLS’s ongoing project to expand its already impressive music catalog by converting rare hard-copy braille scores to digital. “I’m glad that you guys are always finding ways for us as blind individuals to have access,” Whitaker said. “I feel that everybody should have a way of accessing music, whether visually impaired or not.” The interview and concert can be found on the Library’s YouTube channel.
Beyond the Whitaker concert, NLS will share historical content and celebrations from across its nationwide network of libraries on its various digital channels through the rest of the year.
“We are so pleased to have this moment to celebrate this anniversary with our staff, network libraries, patrons and the public,” Keninger said. “At NLS, we are constantly changing and improving, and advances in technology are helping us bring people more content, more easily. Sometimes it’s good to take a look back at what we’ve accomplished.”
In 1930, Rep. Ruth Pratt of New York and Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah introduced identical bills to provide service to blind readers on a national scale through the Library of Congress. That led to passage of the Pratt-Smoot Act, which created what we now know as NLS, the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. The law has been amended several times, extending the service beyond adults who are blind to include children and people with physical and reading disabilities. In addition, in 1962 Congress authorized NLS to collect and maintain a library of musical scores and instructional texts. That collection is now the largest of its kind in the world.
NLS’s work today is as important as it has ever been. “We have a great deal to be proud of—and a great deal to look forward to,” Keninger said.
American Library Association magazine highlights NLS
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced libraries that serve people with disabilities—including those in the NLS network—to come up with creative ways to keep books circulating. “We hear all the time that our materials are lifelines for our patrons. We take that very seriously,” NLS communications and outreach head Kristen Fernekes says in the March/April issue of the American Library Association magazine American Libraries. For nearly a year, NLS network libraries have been working under these unusual circumstances, but with no less enthusiasm. Read more about how NLS and other libraries have served their patrons with disabilities: bit.ly/3c2I9U2