Library Service To Spanish Speaking Patrons

If your library serves a Latino population, you'll want this book. It will help you better serve the needs of Spanish-speaking patrons of all ages. The author gives background information on various Hispanic groups, explaining some of the cultural differences that can lead to misunderstanding. She then offers a variety of program and collection building ideas. A list of distributors of Spanish-language materials-books, periodicals, AV materials, computer and other educational resources-is provided, as well as Web site addresses of Spanish-language sites. Vocabulary lists for library and computer-related words and phrases and guidelines for correctly writing Spanish words are also included.

Increasingly, libraries are struggling to deal with a growing diversity in the cultural background of their patrons. Problems arising from this cultural diversity afflict all library types--school, public and academic. Library Services for Multicultural Patrons is by and for all libraries that are striving to provide multicultural services to match the growing diversity in the cultural background of patrons. The book is designed to offer helpful tips and practical advice to academic, public, and school librarians who want to better serve the multicultural groups in their communities. The contributors to the book are themselves practicing librarians and they share creative ideas for welcoming multicultural patrons into libraries and strategies for serving them more effectively. Librarians will find in these chapters tried and true tips and techniques for marketing and promotion, improving reference services for speakers of English as a second language, and enhancing programming that they can easily implement in their own libraries and communities. The chapters are divided into the following categories for ease of access: 1) Getting Organized and Finding Partners, 2) Reaching Students, 3) Community Connections, 4) Applying Technology, 6) Outreach Initiatives, 6) Programming and Events, and 7) Reference Services. Librarians of all types will be pleased to discover easy-to-implement suggestions for collaborative efforts, many rich and diverse programming ideas, strategies for improving reference services and library instruction to speakers of English as a second language, marketing and promotional tips designed to welcome multicultural patrons into the library, and much more.

This anthology of 17 professional readings provides effective strategies for serving Latinos in the library. These selected case studies focus on the organization and expansion of Spanish-language collections, meeting the demands of Latino children, eliminating cultural and linguistic barriers, and developments in electronic resources and the World Wide Web, among other topics. This work will help stimulate discussion about some of the pressing professional issues of relevance to Latino librarians, such as leadership development, outreach, recruitment and mentorship.

In 1996, nearly 40 million United States citizens were reported to be living in poverty. This enormous number set in conjunction with the rapid growth in demand for more information technology presents librarians with a wrenching dilemma: how to maintain a modern facility while increasing services to the economically disadvantaged. Karen Venturella has gathered a diverse group of librarians and facilitators—including Khafre Abif, head of Children’s Services for the Mount Vernon Public Library in New York; Wizard Marks, who directs the Chicago Lake Security Center in its mission to improve the area; Lillian Marrero, who has concentrated on providing services to the Spanish speaking population; Kathleen de la Pena McCook, director of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida; and 15 others—to find strategies for dealing with the current crisis of disparity. These writers address both the theoretical issues of ensuring access to information regardless of ability to pay, and the practical means for meeting the needs of low income populations. Appendices include the ALA’s “Policy on Library Services to Poor People,” “The Library Bill of Rights,” and a listing of poverty-related organizations.

Explore a wide variety of cooperative initiatives—at regional, statewide, and international levels! This book examines a wide variety of cooperative efforts and consortia in libraries, both geographically and in terms of such activities as digitization and cooperative reference services. You'll learn how libraries are cooperating regionally, on the statewide level, and internationally to provide better service to all kinds of users. Cooperative Efforts of Libraries explores aspects of cooperation that include remote storage, virtual reference service, collection development, staff training and instruction, preservation, interlibrary loan, and international cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean. From the editors: “Cooperation used to mean primarily cataloging via OCLC, interlibrary loan, and perhaps mutual borrowing privileges, but economics and technology are combining to broaden the playing field considerably. This collection reflects this diversity.” Part one of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries highlights cooperation in regional and statewide activity. You'll learn about: Metro, a multitype cooperative designed to coordinate the implementation of virtual reference among libraries in New York City cooperation between remote, rural, and isolated libraries in the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West regions, including the creation of the Online Dakota Information Network (ODIN) and similar organizations a Virtual Library of Virginia project in which the highly specialized skills of librarians were used to enhance vendor-supplied MARC records for a much more accessible full-text database the efforts of each university within the state system in Florida to contribute digitized versions of rare and specialized Floridiana to a joint electronic collection which is available to everyone in the state a centrally funded project to support the information literacy efforts of librarians at each campus of the California State University System and make all of them available at the other campus libraries a joint collection development project within the state universities and community and technical colleges of Minnesota the successful lobbying effort which brought them a $3 million annual supplement to cooperatively redress past underfunding for collections the history of resource sharing in Louisiana, Illinois, and Texas—detailed and extensive analyses Part two of Cooperative Efforts of Libraries presents a sampling of the wide variety of cooperative efforts that make libraries so unusual among institutions and librarians so unusual among professionals. In this section, the President of the Center for Research Libraries discusses the increasing cost and physical constraints that make it difficult for hundreds of libraries to store and preserve print copies of the same research materials. This section also examines: a collaborative digital reference project among three small liberal arts college libraries in New England the history of cooperative collection development among three Pennsylvania college libraries the University of Kansas Libraries' efforts to establish cooperative education programs to microfilm brittle books and create microform masters of embrittled volumes—which are then made available for sale to other libraries an American university's offer of interlibrary access to the students and faculty of an Armenian university where resources are severely limited the challenges of providing interlibrary loan in Latin America the planning of an international summit cosponsored by the Southeast Florida Library Information Network, a regional multitype cooperative in South Florida, and IFLA, designed to lay the groundwork for further cooperative efforts between U.S. libraries and libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean