News - The University of Montana

Ed standing on the Oval in front of Main Hall, July 2002

The Man in the Back Room
In Memory of e-text Producer, Ed Milburn

Long-time e-text producer for Disability Services for Students, Charles Edwin “Ed” Milburn died on May 27, 2009.  He had been diagnosed with cancer in January, undergoing both chemo and radiation treatment until early May, when it was learned that cancer had spread throughout his body.  He was 83.

e-text Champeen of the World!

Ed began at Disability Services in 1995 after working with George Kerscher & Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic here in Missoula – where he began doing e-text.  He was already in his 70s, retired and moved home from New  York City where he’d spent at least a quarter of a century.

In 1995, Director Jim Marks decided to move Disability Services away from recording textbooks for students with disabilities to producing e-text.  This was a huge leap forward in technology and vision for access to print for students with print disabilities – including blind, low vision and various physical and learning disabilities.  It meant moving from a large volunteer reading program, requiring a lot of front office coordination, to what was then a half-time partially volunteer position.  And it was a major change in direction.

We had the benefit of being the right school in the right place.  George Kerscher  of Missoula had begun Computerized Books for the Blind in the late 1980s when he couldn’t get recordings of his computer science textbooks.  Later, Recording for the Blind (and now Dyslexic) absorbed George and his small cadre of  programmers and one part-time RSVP volunteer named Ed Milburn.  Kerscher still works for RFBD, and is Secretary General of the international Daisy Consortium, the worldwide standard setters for accessible text and audio books for the blind and other print disabilities. Thus, Disability Services had the advantage and influence of one of the world-leaders in moving alternate formats out of the analog into the digital era.

Later, when RFBD made other organizational changes, the Missoula office was closed, and that’s when we brought Ed Milburn from Kerscher’s shop to Disability Services. The timing was right for UM, and again, we benefitted – this time in a far more practical way from Kerscher’s pioneering efforts.  We got the one person whom George said even back then had probably created more e-text for blind and  print disabled users than anyone else in the world.

And so we put Ed to work, at first as a volunteer, and later as a half-time employee doing what he was already the world-leader at – creating accessible electronic text that  could be read with a variety of text-to-speech (tts) devices and software.  His office in those days was up on the 3rd floor of Corbin Hall, and he worked with a scanner and WordPerfect 5.1 for  final editing.  He did a handful of titles – or actually parts of titles – each semester.  With limited RAM on the computers we used back in the days of DOS, it was only possible to scan one chapter at a time, so the process was slow, and we simply followed the student’s course syllabus, trying to give them what they needed in advance of the syllabus dates.  E-text was delivered in those days on 3.5-inch floppy discs or loaded onto one of the first hand-held text-readers, known as the Road Runner, which had a complicated and finicky transfer protocol.  And Ed worked entirely alone on all these tasks of e-text production.

By  contrast, this Spring Semester, we received 97 e-text  requests for  94 titles, and we do the entire textbook now using a trained corps of student workers.  Ed’s primary duties the past few years included keeping all the requests straight and on the right track for student workers. Through it all, he remained the man in the  back room who made the e-text, loaded the Road Runners and later BookPorts, burned the CDs with the files and e-mailed the students to let them know their book was now accessible, please come and get it.

Treatment

This last spring, however, Ed’s contributions were unavoidably limited. He was diagnosed with throat  cancer in January, and began weekly chemotherapy almost immediately.  After a couple months of that daily radiation treatments were added.

Ed was a lot of things to our office, but one of the things about him is that he was undoubtedly a child of the Great Depression – a living part of history in the midst of students fresh out of high school (this year, especially) who had been born after Ronald Reagan was no longer President. What was important to him in his job at Disability Services was that he be doing something useful, that he be useful to others.  As such, he was fiercely loyal to the students he served, even at his most cantankerous moments, because he believed what he was doing was important to the access to print of the students whose books were his responsibility to produce.

It wasn’t surprising then, when it came time for Ed to schedule daily radiation treatments, he put them all in the afternoon so that he could still come to work during his customary morning hours.

But all the treatments, drugs and, as it turned out, the inexorable progress of cancer in his body took their cumulative toll on Ed.  He  didn’t make it in every day.  He did see the String Orchestra of the Rockies season through its finale, and attended most of the Lifelong Learning Institute course he was enrolled in this spring.  But on May  7 he learned that the treatments were unsuccessful and, with only a couple of months at most, unnecessary.  He was admitted to St. Pat’s and the next week moved to Riverside Health Care.

Immediately, he began wrapping up the remaining details of his apparently tidy life.  All of his vast collection of classical CDs went to the Missoula Public Library.  A new printer and other items were donated to Disability Services, furniture to  Youth Services, and so on. Everything would be useful, would be used.

Useful

At his hospital room in St. Pats less than three weeks before he died of cancer, Disability Services Director Jim marks pointed out to Ed that it’s still quite possible that he has produced more e-text for people with print disabilities than anyone else in the world.  As such, he has done a great service to UM students and for all of us. And all this after retiring.

He more than fulfilled his desire to be useful, playing a pivotal roll in access to alternate formats for students at UM with print disabilities, but also far beyond UM as many of the titles Ed converted to e-text have been contributed to Bookshare.org, a nonprofit sharing service for books of all kinds for those  who experience barriers to print.  Thus, books in alternate formats that Ed had a hand in are available to people with print disabilities all across the United States.

Friend and Colleague

Useful?  Yes, but much more that that.  Ed was also our colleague and our friend.  He was the guy we shared a laugh with first thing in the morning. The small fellow whose shuffling gait was immediately identifiable to his blind co-workers, who often started a sentence before he’d even gotten to your office door, who showed impatience regularly with the late-teen and twenty-somethings that rotated in and out of his work space every day but who always glowed with the energy and excitement of being around young people.  He was cultured and yet never a prude, a daily reader of the online edition of the New York Times and forwarder of interesting and relevant items he found there.  Devoted to the String Orchestra of the Rockies and to Holy Spirit Church. Ed was the only person in history who ever (and regularly) referred to one of his co-workers as a “dame.”

And we miss him.  Really miss him.

Read more comments and leave yours …

And just what did Ed do before e-text?
Read the Missoulian obituary for more on Ed.
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/06/02/obits/01sun/02_may31.txt

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