History of DAISY

Started in 1988

The DAISY project began in 1988 with the recognition of the dissatisfaction felt toward the then current system of talking books. In 1991 TPB applied for a government grant to cover a three year project to develop a new digital talking book technique. The original plan was to operate a DAT player from a table of contents in a pc. These plans were soon abandoned because of wide spread acceptance of cd-rom players and the new cd-r disc.

Important goals

The two main goals for the three-year project were to develop a system that could:

• Store more than 20 hours of continuous speech on a single cd-rom disc.
• Give the reader random access to the talking book from the table of contents.

In July 1993, TPB commissioned Labyrinten Data AB, a Swedish computer company, to develop software that could demonstrate the principles for recording and playback of digital talking books. The talking book software was built on the DAISY concept (Digital Audio-based Information System). The core of the concept is the phrase-based storage of audio. Additional requirements for the system was:

• Ability to skim the text, phrase by phrase or section by section, where section is a collection of phrases.
• Ability to search for different parts in the text-based table of contents.
• Ability to search for specific pages in the talking book.
• Ability to place and search for bookmarks in the book and in a future version:
• Ability to ´underline´and make notes in the talking book.

The first prototype in 1994

In 1994 the prototype of the DAISY Playback for Windows was ready. The project and the prototype were presented at the ICCHP Conference in Vienna in September 1994.

From the beginning the intention was to show how a new digital talking book system would make it easier for university and other students to use and access the information in their course literature. At the same time there was growing worldwide interest in creating a new common format for talking books.

In 1995 things began to happen rapidly. In April of that year various institutions interested in new digital techniques met in Toronto. A Japanese company, Shinano Kenshi/Plextor, had ideas about how to develop a DAISY specific digital talking book player.

The DAISY Consortium 1996

TPB invited other talking book libraries and organisations to form an international consortium for the promotion of a new digital talking book standard, based on the DAISY concept. In May 1996 in Stockholm the DAISY Consortium was founded (www.daisy.org). The objectives of the consortium were to:

• Establish the DAISY concept as a de facto standard for digital talking books for the print disabled and for commercial audio books.
• Manage the project, develop appropriate tools and systems, and promote the concept.
• Manage the use and licensing of the DAISY concept and properties to maximize the benefit to print disabled people.

A round table meeting in Sigtuna (Sweden) in May 1997 discussed DAISY file format issues. A suggestion was made to change the file format to a de facto industry-standard format that could be used in combination with the HTML markup language.

Regular DAISY production

The first DAISY talking books in Sweden were transferred to DAISY from analogue talking books in 1996. In 1997 most of the transferred titles were course literature at university level, but in 1998 some talking books for the public libraries were transferred. All talking book production at TPB has been in the DAISY-format since 2001.