WebJunction

The South County (La Pine/ Sunriver) staff met last month. I talked with each group individually about the Web-Junction training.
We discussed the following:

What we can do to help with the cultural barriers
• Continue to provide great customer service by being patient, open, and smiling
• Think of the family’s children as ambassadors for Spanish speaking patrons; many children speak English in the schools and are familiar with the role of translator.
• Although South Counties has a small ESL population, we are preparing for the future.

What we are doing currently to help assist the Latino population
• Providing branches with a blow-up example of a filled-out library card application in Spanish.
• Provide educational resources for staff to use: introducing staff to Web-junction web site; CD “Survival Spanish”; Deschutes Outreach sharepoint site

Hello Jo,
I would be really interested to hear the podcast once it is completed. We are working on getting some other podcasts up on WebJunction into a new area (not live yet) called Listening Library. If you, or anyone else, would like to add to the collection, let us know.

Emily

Hi Emily-
Yes I'll let you know when we've completed. Yes, Deschutes Public Library would be interested in your new Listening Library-thanks for the heads up.
Jo

4/8/08 Cindy Lu from the La Pine Public Library took the COIC Survival Spanish Course. She wrote the following feedback on her experience:

The instructor was great, kept it fun, but he taught very well. The class was also small so everyone had more one-on-one time with the instructor. The problem was, the course was teaching set statements. Its a little difficult to know when to say these statements when you have no idea what the patron just said. I realize that a short course like this can’t teach you Spanish overnight, but I was disappointed that they didn’t get into any Spanish except what we might say to them. Also, when I showed the list of phrases to a native speaker, she laughed and said that nobody spoke like that. It was very formal and repetitive. All the responses were complete sentences, when it would often be less formal and friendlier to have 2-3 word answers. For example, when the patron asks how long they can check a book out, we were taught to say, “you may check out the book for 3 weeks”, when for anyone else we would simply say three weeks. Clt

Hi Colleen,

It is great to hear about your progress in Deschutes. I just wanted to point out the Serving Spanish Speakers Success Checklist as a possible resource for questions to ask: http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=11200

By this fall we will also have another great resource to share. We are currently doing a national research project with the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute that looks at Latino Perceptions of Public Libraries. They have developed a great questionnaire for the study. My hope is that libraries will want to use the questions to compare how their own community's perceptions match up with those around the country.

Hope to get a chance to meet you in person at OLA/WLA next week!

Laura Staley