VDOT employees now have access to more than 2,500 audio books, which are accessible through the Skillsoft Books database.
Most of those titles are from the BusinessPro collection, however, some deal with broad subjects like lifelong learning, wellness or innovation. These audio books can be accessed via smartphones or downloaded as MP4 files for transfer to portable devices.
Finding Skillsoft Audio Books
In Skillsoft Books, the audio books are mixed in with nearly 28,000 eBooks, videos and book summaries.
The best way to find audio books is to go to Skillsoft, then search for a specific book by its title or author, or run a general search (Example: Leadership).
Using the latter as an example, when you get search results back, look for the option to "ADD FILTERS" which appears toward the top of the screen and looks like this:
Selecting "ADD FILTERS" opens a screen that lets you add filters to your search results. Filters include: subject, content "type" and publication date.
Under the books category select the "Audio Books" option, which looks like this, to limit results to Audio Books:
Finally, click the "Apply" button. You'll return to the results screen but now you will only see audio books that are on the subject of Leadership.
The Skillsoft Books interface does not include audio software, but selecting "Download" allows you download the book as a series of .mp3 files, which can be "played" on VDOT computers (just click to file to download it and once fully downloaded click it again to play it).
NOTE: In addition to audio books (which are audio recordings of full-length published books) VDOT employees have access to a source called Business Book Summaries, which has nearly 4,000 condensed "summaries" of full-length published books, typically 3-6 pages long.
About 3,000 of those summaries include an "Audio Summary" option that appears on the left-hand side of the screen when viewing an item. It looks like this:
Selecting the Audio Summary feature prompts an audio software reader to start "reading" the summary with one click inside the browser. Users also have the option to download an .mp3 copy of the file for transfer to other devices.
