Population Served:
26,000 Project Contact: Tom Kern Project Title: Increasing Visibility of Literacy Resources and Services at Wauconda Area Public Library Project Description: Our proposed project has three parts: |
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2) Create a high-quality brightly-colored brochure of library services highlighting the literacy collection. The brochure will be distributed to the schools, ESL classes, family literacy students, and other community groups and businesses serving Hispanics.
3) Fine-tune our literacy collection. The library will purchase more resources for this collection, especially multimedia items, which are very popular. An online guide to area literacy services and web-based resources for learning English will also be created to be posted on the Spanish page of the library’s newly redesigned website, which is scheduled to be launched in May of 2008.
Notable accomplishment, promising practices, or human interest stories: Most notable accomplishment will be our 20-minute video tour of the library, narrated in Spanish, including special coverage of our ESL/Literacy services. The video will be viewed as a whole or in parts: Intro, Literacy, Adult Services, Technology, and Children’s Services. Video will be available on our website and will provide DVDs free of charge. A second video using the same footage will be narrated in English, structured in the same modules as the Spanish video. Our new library brochure in Spanish will also promote services to the Hispanic community in our library district, using the printed format to say what the video portrays visually and through narration.
It is too soon to track usage, but we are confident that website usage and circulation statistics in the coming months will demonstrate the success of this project.
Key lessons learned: The production of a 20-minute video in Spanish and English from beginning to end is a complex process requiring excellent teamwork. Scripting the video in English, making sure nothing you wanted to say is left out, then translating to Spanish, and then ensuring that the English and Spanish narrations are equal in timing from segment to segment is challenging. Finding good Spanish and English narrators could also be a challenge, but we were very lucky to have someone on staff who did an outstanding job at the Spanish narration. We also were fortunate to have easy access to the Library Production Studio, who played an essential role in producing a high-quality video and making this project a success.
Another important lesson is that a complex project such as this takes a lot of time, and 6 months was not quite enough, given that so many things have to come together before the project can be completed. One delay in our project came because we were in the midst of installing a café and a teen space, and saw no point in shooting the video until these were complete, since they are important new services we would not want to leave out. Nevertheless, we did, in fact, manage to shoot the video within the 6-month time frame, and even completed the voice over. Now all that remains is the editing. The brochure will go to printer within the next couple of weeks.
Advice for other libraries serving adult English language learners: The key to serving this population is getting the word out in their language that you provide these services and that they are more than welcome to take advantage of them at no cost to them, and that any records of their participation in or utilization of these services is confidential and that their privacy is protected.