Latinos are the fastest growing population group in the United States. It is important to plan for diverse collections and services in our academic and public libraries when you combine a large and growing Latino population with the very high population growth of this group. Library professionals who are prepared to serve ethnically diverse populations will be better positioned to be effective in light of the dramatic impact on libraries and other service agencies providing services to Latinos.
With that in mind, today’s How-To-Do-It Tip comes from Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians, Second Edition written by Camila A. Alire and Jacqueline Ayala:
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“Basic services are the place to start when planning for your Latino community. We suggest the following steps to help you get started:
Identify existing basic services.
You and your staff are in the best position to evaluate and identify the basic programs and services that are already available for Latino residents to use. By basic services, we mean those services that can be provided at no extra cost because they are already covered in your current budget. For example, many services such as circulation, general reference, readers’ advisory, meeting rooms; or programming for different audiences such as children, teens, and adults are available to those Latinos who are either monolingual in English or bilingual.
Modify those basic services.
After you have identified those existing basic services and programs, you need to modify them to ensure that Latino residents in your community can benefit from them. Let’s take children’s programming for example. If you are planning children’s programming for the month of April, you may want to include activities for all children (non-Latino and Latino) around El Día de los Niños/El Día de los Libros which is traditionally celebrated on April 30. Activities could include a story hour around a children’s book with multiethnic characters and performance by a children’s dance troupe that would depict the Latino subgroup or subgroups in your community.
Conduct targeted programming.
Programming around holidays is also a good way to attract Latinos of any age. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving are some of the major holidays and a popular celebration in Latin America is “El Día de las Madres” (Mother’s Day), which in Mexico is celebrated every May 10th. The tradition of honoring mothers, grandmothers, and godmothers during “Día de las Madres” can provide a good theme for Latino programming incorporating crafts, literature and oral tradition or storytelling.
Implement signage in Spanish.
If your library really wants the Latino community to feel welcome, there is no better way to do that than with Spanish signage in the library. Signage is a very basic service that can be done at minimal cost. With bilingual signage, you tell Latinos that you recognize and accept their cultural differences and want to serve them and that they are welcome in your library. Figure 5–1 on page xx and xx provides a Spanish translation for the Dewey Decimal Classification System signage.
Export library card signup.
Another basic service for Latinos that takes little, if any, additional funds is the library card application process. You can choose to design one bilingual form or two separate forms—one in English and one in Spanish. Whichever you choose, merely providing the application in both languages leaves a favorable impression in the community (See image below of Beaufort County (South Carolina) Library’s bilingual card application form). The process for signing up Latinos does not have to be in the library. In the County of Arlington, VA there was a library card sign-up in conjunction with a bilingual Reading Readiness program held at Hecht’s (now part of Macy’s) Department Store. Library card signups are held at the cultural celebrations throughout the County and annually at the Arlington County Fair. (T. Bissessar personal communication, October 28, 2006) Export your library card sign-up with volunteers and a table set up at the grocery store, schools, post office, outside social services offices, after church, or at Latino festivals.
(Click on the image to enlarge.)
Conduct open houses and tours.
You can work with a partner in the Latino community to organize another no-cost or low-cost service which is library open houses and tours designed specifically for the community. If possible, distribute library card applications in advance and with the help of your partnering organization have them completed and returned to you in time to have processed the cards for distribution at the event. These programs should be offered at times when the whole Latino family is available. Be creative to keep the costs down. We suggest you get a local food business to donate some food for coffee hour or an informal reception after the tours.
Consider hiring a translator.
An intermediary translator could work in the library for three hours once a week (for example, Thursday evenings from 5 to 8 p.m.). If you can find the funds, pay a bilingual resident to serve as an intermediary translator (between Spanish-speaking user and English-speaking library staff). Even at a $10 hourly rate, that is only $1,560 per year. If that is still impossible, try to get some bilingual community residents to volunteer several hours a week. Teens could serve in this capacity and can either work on behalf of your Library’s Teen Advisory Group (or TAG) or perform the hours of volunteer work in order to satisfy requirements toward graduation from high school. We suggest that you set a time and day to offer bilingual services. For example, every Tuesday and Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m. you could offer bilingual services. Basically, the volunteers would be able to translate wherever needed in the library during those hours.”
-Excerpted from: Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians, Second Edition, pp. 82-89. ©2007 by Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
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