DAISY Information

Navigation Ability

Books that support all of the navigation of the DAISY format include more capabilities than books on tape, such as:

  • Book skimming: Readers "navigate" forward or backward by word, paragraph, page or chapter, so they can easily skim through the book to get a quick sense of its content.
  • Going right to pages, chapters, section headers, etc.: When specific information or a reading assignment starts on page 37 or chapter 3, the reader can jump right to that location in the book.
  • Support for Table of Contents and an Index: The DAISY standard supports these methods of referencing information in books. For example, if the DAISY book includes an index, a reader can find a referenced word or phrase and jump right to that reference to review it.
  • Note-taking capabilities: Readers can take margin notes or mark passages in a book, similar to using a highlighter pen to mark words or sections in a printed book. This functionality is dependent on the software player used to read the book, rather than on the book itself.

Bookshare books, since they originate as scanned books, can currently be navigated by word, paragraph and page. The books can also be searched by word. For example, you could search for each occurrence of the word "revolution." Also, passages can be bookmarked within the software DAISY reader provided with Bookshare membership, Read:OutLoud Bookshare Edition. The DAISY standard does not require incorporation of all navigation features; the ability to navigate depends of the navigation features built into the book.

Resources

If you are interested in knowing more about the DAISY standard, please visit the DAISY Consortium's website at www.daisy.org.

For more technical information about DAISY format books, visit the Consortium’s Technology Overview page at http://www.daisy.org/multimedia.

The DAISY Consortium has adopted a NISO standard format, ANSI/NISO Z39.86, as the DAISY standard. Read more about this at www.loc.gov/nls/niso.