Eleven years ago, at 73, Dr. Hilary Connor, “an old pediatrician” and a former assistant to the U.S. surgeon general, completely lost his eyesight in 48 hours following an inflammation of the artery that supplies blood to the optic nerve.
Connor decided to learn Braille and soon heard about the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Mount Vernon, which offered books on tape and was within walking distance from his South Baltimore neighborhood. On his first visit, he met Mary Kuforiji, a library regular who had been blind since birth, by literally bumping into her then-4-year-old daughter Olufisayo at a sculpture exhibition. Ever since, he?s been a mainstay in the five-story building on Park Avenue, where both he and Mary volunteer several times a week.
“All you have to do is walk in and they grab you, they have a great staff,” Connor said.
Part of the Maryland State Department of Education, the library holds more than 260,000 items and serves more than 10,000 people each year, mostly mailing cassette books to blind and physically disabled patrons across the state. The institution also hosts a variety of programs, including a monthly book club, performances from the nearby Everyman Theatre and quarterly visits to the Walters Art Museum, featuring vivid, tactile descriptions of the paintings by guides and hands-on sculpture tours.
The library has its own studio for recording books on local topics and by Maryland authors, and is in the beginning stages of recording and transferring their stock of 45,000 audio cassette books onto digital flash memory cartridges, similar to MP3 audio files.
In 2008, new books, sent from the National Library Service, will be in digital form as well, Director Jill Lewis said.
The reference room on the first floor is home to traditional material in cassette form, a talking globe, Braille atlas and a computer center where e-mail is checked, resumes updated, the Internet surfed, recipes found and newspapers and magazines are read online with the help of a Braille or voice-screen reader.
For your information
» The LBPH, 415 Park Ave., Baltimore, is part of the network of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Library of Congress. Open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the second Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
» A request for membership application can made by calling 410-230-2424, (TTY) 410-333-8679 or (fax) 410-333-2095. Outside the Baltimore area: 800-964-9209 and (TTY) 800-934-2541. Or visit www.lbph.lib.md.us.
