LATI Project Brochure

MY GOAL

Is to provide a location in the library with information written in Spanish for Spanish speaking patrons.

A designated area would become a familiar place for Spanish speakers to go directly to, and for library staff to have as an immediate point of reference. A table with information written in Spanish would save patrons and library staff considerable time as well as provide an effective and efficient service.

Fliers, brochures, booklets, and bilingual newspapers, would inform patrons of library, community, state, and federal programs and services.

These materials would be produced by library staff, community groups and government agencies. Materials would include such things as tax information and US Dept. of Education brochures on FAFSA (Free Application for Student Aid).

This service will help Spanish speakers


feel welcome and direct them to agencies that could meet their social, economic, educational, legal, and health needs.


SUMMARY-- HOW IT ALL BEGAN

When Spanish speaking patrons asked for information about library programs and services, I found myself rushing from one end of the library to another gathering information I had translated. I found this hide-and-seek activity embarrassing and a waste of time. I also realized these patrons were unaware of the availability of these materials. I concluded the library was in desperate need of a spot designated for information written in Spanish.
I decided to expand on what we offered by including information from community groups and government agencies.
I based this decision on questions such as, “Where can I go to enroll in an ESL (English as a Second Language) class?”
“I don’t have dental insurance and need dental care, who can I contact?”
I performed research, organized lists, communicated my intentions, and requested information written in Spanish.



STEPS TAKEN TO ACCOMPLISH GOAL


I spoke with my supervisor and co-workers about the idea of having a table with information written in Spanish.

I used the Delaware Hispanic Yellow Pages, El Tiempo Hispano (local bilingual newspaper), the New Castle County website, Library Health Specialist, Susan LaValley, and my own personal list of sources to create a list of agencies to contact.

I formed two lists. One of agencies and one of patron needs. I divided the agency list under different jurisdictions such as community, federal and so on. I divided the needs list into health, legal and so on. I then combined the two to assure agencies and needs corresponded.

I emailed some groups and phoned others, stated my intentions, and requested 50 to 100 copies of what they had. Not all had information written in Spanish, such as the Christiana School District.




As more agencies produce information written in Spanish, I will add these to our table. I will also contact sources to replenish materials when they run low.

Display: I obtained a card size table with a pegboard and placed them by the entrance of the children’s room, where the display can be easily seen when patrons enter the library. I created a colorful, eye-catching, big letter sign and placed it across the top of the pegboard. INFORMATE, (get informed) it reads.

Equipment used: Clear multi-sided, multi-tiered, plastic holders, and a floor spinner. I did not need to purchase materials.

I filled the plastic holders with materials mailed to the library. I took photos of the display and of our Spanish language materials.


RESOURCES

Library Manager, Susan Menson, Children’s Librarian, Tanya Moye, Library Specialist, Ross Fuller, Library Health Specialist, Susan LaValley.


Agencies include: DE Coalition for Literacy, Inc., New Castle Head Start, Inc.,
Community Legal Aid Society, American
Cancer Society, National Institute of Aging, Wilmington Dept. of Police, IRS, US Dept. of Education, Christiana School District, Christiana EVAN START Family Literacy, El Tiempo Hispano (bilingual newspaper), The Latin American Community Center, local health groups such as DE Breast Cancer Coalition, Inc., and Westside Health Clinic.


WHAT I LEARNED

I was reminded patience is a virtue. Although I received responses from the majority of the groups I contacted, I haven’t heard from others. I re-learned I can be creative, persistent, organized, and I can easily picture what I need and what I want. I also found it rewarding to be able to materialize my ideas.

PROJECT SCORE

I give myself a 9.9. I’m please with the service I have created and hope patrons
find it educating and empowering.

Adriana Camacho-Church
Bear Library
New Castle County http://www.nccdelib.org/
March 2007

INFORMATE
Information written in Spanish

LATI 30 SECOND TV COMMERCIAL




Adriana Camacho-Church
Bear Library
New Castle County


Project Title: INFORMATE (Get Informed)
Information in Spanish

Description: A table with information written in Spanish for Spanish speaking patrons. Fliers, brochures, booklets, and bilingual newspapers, inform patrons of library, community, state, and federal programs and services.

COMMERCIAL:

A Spanish speaking patron with limited English skills walks into a library.
She walks toward the reference desk with a determined face.

“ESL (English as a Second Language) class?” she asks annunciating each letter and word.

“Do you speak Spanish?” asks the librarian with a smile.

“Yes,” says the patron.

The reference librarian stands up and walks with the patron to a table where a big, colorful sign hangs across the top of a pegboard. INFORMATE (get informed) reads the sign.

The patron looks surprised and pleased.

The librarian hands her a blue bookmark with a list of phone numbers and names of places that offer free ESL classes in the area.

The patron smiles and says, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says the librarian.

The librarian walks away.

The patron looks at and takes other information.

Later on that day, the patron meets a girl friend for lunch.
“I now know where to go for a mammogram exam and I know how Arturo can sign up for financial aid,” said the patron in Spanish, as she pulls out two brochures from her purse.

“Where did you get these?” her friend asks in Spanish.

“A friendly librarian at the Bear Library showed me a table with information written in Spanish. Fliers, brochures, booklets, and bilingual newspapers, inform patrons of library, community, state, and federal programs and services.

“What a great idea! Said the friend, “I’ll have to stop by and check it out.”


END

LATI STANDS FOR

Library Associate Training Institute.
The journey began August 2006 and ended in March 2007.

LATI IS

a training program for library staff.
Staff is taught how to use web and print tools, techniques, and information for personal and professional growth.
Students evaluate, analyze, explore, and reflect on, print, electronic, audio, video, and expert human resources to develop research strategies, to identify specific resources for finding information, and to select and collect the most effective and most reliable library resources.
Staff is taught how to enhance customer service through effective communication and behavior.
Staff is taught how to keep-up-to-date with an ever changing digital world that has made our jobs in the 21 century more efficient and yet more challenging. We explored digital audio and e-books, podcast sites and blogs. Learned about iPods, mp3s, and came face to face with such acronyms as PDF (portable document format).

IN THE BEGINNING

Instructors asked students to select a quote that would reflect our thoughts and intentions through our LATI training.
“Learning without thought is labor lost.” Confucius.
I picked this quote because it is a simple truth. If we don’t stop to take the time to think about what we’re learning and how it fits into the scheme of things, then it doesn’t become part of us, part of our knowledge, and part of our truth. At times I rush through what I’m doing just to get it out of the way and move on to whatever else needs to get done. This usually leads to a waste of time, unnecessary mistakes, and little or no knowledge.
Confucius’ quote reminds me to be, to slow down, to learn, to absorb.

MISSION STATEMENT

It’s very important for me to provide services and programs that make a difference in improving lives. I like to inspire people to strive for their goals.
One of LATI’s early assignments included reading Daniel H. Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind.” The book examines the importance of using the creative and imaginative side of our brain, the right side, to explore ways to compete in a twenty-first century global economy.
In his book, Pink asks, “What is professional success?”
To me it means to make a positive difference in someone’s life through the work I do. It means to get satisfaction and enjoyment from what I do, to become an expert in my field, to accomplish my goals, to get rewarded and recognized for what I do, and to get paid well.

LATI FINAL PROJECT

To creat a service or product to enhance our patron’s library experience. Being a creative person, loving color, and begin receptive to people’s needs, the right side of my brain kicked into full gear. Many ideas crossed my mind and I visualized each one of them, but one took hold and that’s the one I concentrated on. For the project to take root I needed to communicate my idea effectively and persuasively. I had to make sure that those whose help I would seek would not only see my vision, but see how this idea could benefit their group as well. I also had to make my project attractive and noticeable, and most importantly this project had to be something that would educate and empower people.

A FOUR PART PROJECT

Produce a brochure explaining project plan and process, write a 30-second commercial depicting service or product, create an exhibit display board, and create a portfolio documenting my project and LATI learning journey, which is what this blog is for.

Note: While working on this project I came up with another idea to improve customer service. It involves producing a bookmark with a list of websites.

MY PROJECT IDEA

To provide a location in the library with information written in Spanish for Spanish speaking patrons.
A designated area would become a familiar place for Spanish speakers to go directly to, and for library staff to have as an immediate point of reference. A table with information written in Spanish would save patrons and library staff considerable time as well as provide an effective and efficient service.
I based this decision on questions such as, “Where can I go to enroll in an ESL (English as a Second Language) class?”
“I don’t have dental insurance and need dental care, who can I contact?”
I organized a table with colorful fliers, brochures, booklets, and bilingual newspapers that inform patrons of library, community, state, and federal programs and services.

Note: Another reason why I chose this project.
I received an email from the library’s bilingual computer class instructor. He requested information written in Spanish that explained how to log in to our library computers. We do have an instruction sheet available with this information in Spanish at the reference desk, but he had not noticed it and neither had his students. This bothered me because he mentioned that some of his students do not have computers at home to practice on. Therefore, they had been missing out on an opportunity to improve their computer skills because of a language barrier and for not knowing that we do have these instructions in Spanish.

One of the biggest challenges of this project is creating this blog. I’m still learning how to put one together, but I'm having a great time learning.

Note: While working on this project I reinforced partnerships and made strong connections with other community groups. I received an email from Westside Health Clinic requesting information about our library programs for them to post. And a Latin American Community Center, director thank me during our phone conversation for forming a partnership with them. The LACC, in Wilmington, provides social services to the Hispanic community.

LATI NOVEMBER FACE-TO-FACE AT DOVER

November 2006.
We discussed Readers’ Advisory resources, genres, the importance of knowing our library’s databases and overall library collection. We looked at who is our 21 century customer, and what new technology we should expect in the next decade.

WHAT LATI TAUGHT ME

LATI took me back to square one. The training forced me to stop, think, evaluate, learn, and keep on learning by using the tools I acquired during the training.

My quote comes to mind…“Learning without thought is labor lost.” Confucius.

One of the most useful and valuable assignments for me was evaluating basic reference, and subject web and print resources. Questions such as, what kind of questions can this resource answer? How frequent is it updated? What is the purpose of the site, its strength and weaknesses? helped me create a mental outline of what I should look for when evaluating a resource. This assignment also gave me the opportunity to explore resources that otherwise I would not have and to discover new ones.

Instructors provided students with a valuable list of reference, print, and web resources to explore.

The source evaluation rubric and criteria for evaluation web sites and reference materials were all extremely helpful to me. I plan to continue to use these tools to enhance my job performance and to thus provide better customer service.

Example: I explored NOAH (New York Online Access to Health) and added it to my collection list of important resources. NOAH provides health information in English and Spanish. NOAH text comes from reputable and authoritative web-based resources such as the American Cancer Association. URL: http://www.noah-health.org/
Example: The Math Forum @ Drexel is another great site. It’s an online question and answer service for math students and teachers. This is a fabulous site for anyone regardless of age and math knowledge who needs to teach or improve their math skills. http://www.mathforum.org/

READERS' ADVISORY

I also found the Readers’ Advisory assignment quite helpful. I ventured into genres I had no interest in such as a gothic/fantasy teen novel titled, ‘A Great and Terrible Beauty,’ by Libby Bray. I also studied, People Magazine en Español (in Spanish), a resource I don’t care for. I dislike all celebrity magazines.
I must say thought, Bray’s tale about the adventures of a 16-year-old girl, was actually quite fascinating. And although I still don’t like People Magazine in Español, I can now talk about it with confidence to an interested patron.
The Readers’ Advisory form was useful to me because it gave me an idea of how to evaluate different library collections.

EXPLORE NEW WEB TOOLS

Explore New Web Tools was a part of the training I found frustrating, interesting, and fascinating. I’m not a computer gadget, electronic kind of person, so this session forced me to discover some awesome web sites, such as Flikr, and not so reliable ones, in my opinion, such as WIKIpedia. I also discovered such web tools as blogs, podcasts, podomate, and looked into audio books and myspace.com. I also looked deeper into hand held devices, such as ipods, which I learned how to use, and blackberries. We learned about the need for certain software or gadgets as requirements for compatibility with certain computer programs. I also discovered a whole new language of computer acronyms, quite scary. If you don’t know what some of these acronyms stand for, you might not be able to get the software or programming you need, or understand instructions that could otherwise be simple to follow.
I came across instructions that stated something like …and don’t forget your PDF files so everyone can read them. PDF, portable document format, a translation format to distribute so everyone can read your files.

Note: I still have to complete my digital eBook assignment

CORE COLLECTION

For this assignment students need to select 10 resources that we would want with us on a desert island. These are my ten:

World Almanac and Book of Facts
An iPod
MedlinePlus
Columbia Gazetteer of the World
Practical Guide to Practically Everything
Your dictionary.com.
Any Who Online Directory
American Board of Medical Specialist
Encyclopedia of World History
Congress.org.

LATI TRAINING SUGGESTIONS

To me the last four months of LATI were the most informative and useful. I feel we really didn’t get to the meat of the matter until mid October when we began our Explore New Web Tools session. November through February assignments I found most valuable and important. I suggest training should start with these assignments first.

OVER ALL

LATI left me with ideas, information, and strategies that I can use over and over to explore resources, to increase my knowledge, and to expand my horizons. I can say I now have more confidence on how to do my job than I did before I started LATI. This is an important and valuable course for all library staff because it helps us become aware of our jobs, where we’re heading, and what we need to do to keep up with technology and shifting demographics. I believe this course or a version of this course should be taken by staff members every three years or so to keep abreast of changes and to take us out of our comfort zones.

THANK YOUS

THANKS TO LATI INSTRUCTORS Kathy Graybeal and Honore Francois.

Kathy Graybeal presently works as a development coordinator at the Delaware Division of Libraries/State Library.
Honore Francois currently is the coordinator of the Maryland public libraries’ Library Associate Training Institute.