You Can Now Volunteer to Record Audiobooks for People Who Are Blind

LAMP volunteer Kate Loitz in Philadelphia recording an audiobook / Photograph courtesy of LAMP

What do you do if you’re blind, or have low vision, when you want to listen to an audio version of a book you’re dying to hear but no audio version has ever been recorded? Sure, millions of audiobooks already exist, but they’re only a fraction of all the books that have ever been written. Which means people with serious vision problems – about 7 million people in the U.S. alone, according to the Center for Disease Control – can access only a fraction of the world’s books.

Tara Lynne Murphy, a Mount Airy mom, aims to change that. And she needs our help.

Murphy, who started her career as a librarian at the Free Library in 2007, is now in charge of the Library of Accessible Media for Pennsylvanians (LAMP) in Spring Garden, which offers free, accessible books and magazines – audio, larger print, and braille – to those who are unable to read standard print. She’s well-versed with vision struggles, since her father was an optometrist and shop talk was common at home. And she spent much of her childhood volunteering with an organization that trained guide dogs for people with visual impairments.

LAMP has its roots in 19th-century Philadelphia, when it was known as the Home Teaching Society for the Blind and Free Circulating Library for the Blind. Today, its collection numbers some 1.5 million titles.

Murphy oversees LAMP’s newly upgraded recording studio, whose sole purpose is to create audiobooks on demand for qualified patrons. Which includes more than those with vision impairment, Murphy points out.

“Let’s say that due to a horrible injury, you can’t use your hands to turn the pages of a book,” she says. “We have you covered for that.”

LAMP director Tara Lynne Murphy / Photograph by Jeff Fusco

But only if LAMP has enough volunteer readers to create more audiobooks.

So far, LAMP volunteers have recorded just six books, including Kill for Thrill: The Crime Spree that Rocked Western Pennsylvania and Police, Politics Corruption: The Mixture Dangerous to Freedom and Justice. In the works are Blue-Collar Conservatism and A Lenape Among the Quakers. LAMP just received a particularly demanding and quite niche request: the entire six-volume set of the ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications, complete with lots of technical drawings and diagrams that have to be translated into voice. “This one is a real challenge,” admits Murphy.

As will be the time commitment. It takes upwards of 30 hours to record the average book, Murphy says. And the studio is open only from nine to five, Monday through Friday, limiting when a volunteer can show up. But “it’s perfect for retirees,” Murphy adds.

One such retiree is Center City resident Kate Loitz, whose professional background is in singing and acting. (She also volunteers at the main branch of the Free Library, giving tours in the rare books department.) “I loved recording a novel called Northern Liberties that should really be more popular,” she says of the work of historical fiction set in 19th-century Philadelphia. “It’s about people who dug up fresh graves to sell bodies to medical schools. Fascinating.”

Loitz suggests that volunteer readers approach the recording process with a lot of patience, because you will mess up, again and again, and have to do multiple takes. “It’s also important to record in a conversational voice, not in a dry academic one, even if what you’re reading might be dry,” she advises. “You have to sound engaging, like a good teacher.”

LAMP has had some semblance of a recording studio for years; ages ago, the organization even created a 78-rpm record of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous 1946 guide to child-rearing, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. But the recording studio that existed when Murphy arrived was far from state-of-the-art, and LAMP wasn’t certified by the Library of Congress to actually record audiobooks. (The organization reports to the Library of Congress and the Office of Commonwealth Libraries in Harrisburg; administratively, though, it’s under the umbrella of the Free Library of Philadelphia.)

Certification involves meeting requirements around things like recording quality and encryption standards designed to prevent the audiobooks from being shared by just anyone. After all, the copyrighted material is being provided gratis to the audiobook requestor. All LAMP-produced audiobooks become available nationwide to those who need them through the National Library Service’s Blind and Print Disabled database The turnaround time, from request to delivery, is at least three months.

The audiobook recordings at LAMP thus far have been fairly straightforward: the volunteer reads the word on the page. Sounds simple, but you’d be surprised, says Murphy. “One LAMP reader had a can of seltzer with them in the studio. You could hear every bubble pop,” she says with a laugh. “So now we instruct everybody: no seltzer!”

Murphy is excited to expand the offerings of the LAMP studio to the world of graphic novels, for which volunteers would read audio descriptions of the illustrations, which would give listeners a vivid sense of the intricate images that accompany the text. “It’s going to take several months just to write it all out before anyone even starts reading,” she explains. “But we’re going to get it done.”

If you’d like to volunteer your time to record an audiobook at LAMP, send an email to lamp@freelibrary.org. And if you want to request an audio version of a book, visit mylamp.org. Or fax LAMP at 215-683-3212. Says Murphy, “Faxes are huge in the low-vision community.”