World Braille Day

  Introduction  The Nederlandsche Blindenbibliotheek (Dutch Library for the Blind) has been lending books to the blind since 1895. We started off with braille books only. In 1958 talking books on open-reel tapes were introduced and the number of readers increased rapidly. Nowadays we mainly lend talking books on compact cassettes. The talking book on compact cassette is by far the easiest to use and especially many elderly people benefitted from it. Since we introduced the compact cassette in 1972 the lending figures raised from 0.6 million to 2.2 million in 1978. Evidently this rapid growth imposed great changes on our library. In the early days a team of a few people registered the books in the catalogue, lent them to the blind and put them back on the shelves when they were returned. At the moment three departments are in charge of all this: The catalogue department registers books in the catalogue and selects books to be added to our collection. The lending department sele...

  Introduction  A set of programs oriented to natural language pro cessing have been designed and implemented. These programs were first applied to French language analysis and led to creation of the PIAF system (Programmes Interactifs dfAnalyse du Fran§ais). Some applications are operational mainly in automatic information retrieval where the PIAF system performs two tasks in parallel: 1. Data acquisition and control, 2. Production of simple or compound key words. Following a request from the Centre National des Arts et Metiers, we have developed the contracted braille transla tion and editing of French texts with respect to typo graphic codes from programs and basic algorithms of the PIAF system. General Principles of the PIAF System  We propose to the average user a set of tools to define and handle textual datas, under the control of an editor: i) The definition tools are facilities to create and perform interactive updating of the dictionaries and models of the selec...