WebJunction

Catherine and I presented the first Montana workshop on Oct 26. Everything went very well. It was in Bozeman, where Catherine lives, and she did a lot of work to prepare. It made a big difference. She had arranged for 3 community leaders and they were very interesting. It was a high point of the day.

The workshop involved the entire staff of the Bozeman Public Library. They had a staff meeting at 8 am prior to the workshop and by 2:30 they were pretty tired. We ended up finishing at 4:30 and EVERYONE was glad, including Catherine and I. So, 6.5-7 hours should be a limit to a person's workshop day, I think. Also, the part of the workshop before lunch should definitely be longer than the after lunch portion of the workshop.

We got a lot of positive feedback - people thought it was surprisingly interesting and informative. Also, some networking (through the community leaders) was
accomplished and they forged some partnerships with the library. It was a really productive day for Spanish outreach at the Bozeman Library.

I know the workshop is designed for collaboration between libraries, but I can see some positive things about a library doing this internally, as Bozeman did it.

I changed some slides from bullet form to graphic form. I also created slides with graphs, maps and pictures. I'm going to consolidate some of the WebJunction slides. I had to skim over some things to keep everything on time, anyway. I noticed that Yolanda did this in Seattle, as well.

We did all the Action Plan Exercises, which is important to help get the staff talking to each other about the issues.

Catherine and I kept each other on time. The Action Plan Exercises were a very good time to keep each other informed about time issues.

The workshop turned out very well. It was a very good day!

I did my first training yesterday as a staff training for those people who could come. I had 13 participants, most new to me. It went so well! The powerpoint and the exercises were so organized that it almost didn't need a trainer but I enjoyed myself anyway! I had only one out of 2 community leaders show up, Yuri Cunza. He is the president of the Nashville Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the editor of a local Latino newspaper, La Noticia. Because he also is active in the movie business here, he is a captivating speaker. He was a little late so I starting reading from a neighborhood listserv regarding Latinos and immigration in the community. I hope to post it to the Political Climate thread soon. Believe me, I had a full pack of tricks in case I had no shows! I did fill in for the person who could not come due to illness from his community interview. From the initial feedback, everyone wanted more leaders in the panel because it is so eye opening.

The part that was the big surprise was when I realized that the Suggested Outreach Activities handout was not in their folder and we had to brainstorm together as a group. Fabulous ideas!!! One was to have the Dept of Transportation come in and do a class in Spanish since Driver's Licenses are a hot button. The largest idea and committment was to have a Hispanic Heritage Month next fall with a whole series of activities in all the libraries with a booklet advertising the events as well as explaining the history and tie-ins to celebrations that we have here. Great training materials + incredibly responsive audience = a valuable session. After it was over, I felt like I belonged to a new committee with a Latino warmth.

Here are some slide changes we made. I would suggest making more slides with graphics. Many of the slides have statistics that lend themselves to some kind of chart. The sources I used to make the map slides are on the slide so you can make slides pertinent to your state.

Attachments:

Slide_changes.ppt (5,663.0k)

Thanks Kathy! I agree that graphics add a lot to a presentation.

Stephanie Zimmerman (PA)

Hello All,
MA will be holding our 2nd training tomorrow. The first, held on 10/25 went very well. Eleanor and Hagar were the trainers for a group of 14. Tomorrow we have 21 registered and Hagar and I will be the trainers. Shelley is our coordinator for the community leaders at each workshop and the panel was definitely a highlight of the first training. Eleanor and Hagar did a wonderful job customizing the SLO for MA and we are delighted with the response of the library community so far.
Nancy

Here we are at our 2nd workshop. Great participation and panel today!

Massachusetts had its second workshop last Thursday in the western part of the state. Nancy and I were the co-trainers for this session and it felt like a very successful day. We had a great turnout: 22 people. Up 50% from our previous session! The room was comfortable, the food was great, and the participation was the best part.

I felt much more confident this time and really paid attention to the critiques I had gotten from my wonderful cotrainers the first time around. Shelley put together an excellent panel of community leaders from the region, and we hopefully got some great partnerships started.

I also really enjoyed seeing this part of the state. On the way back, Shelley took the back roads so I could get a peek at the remaining foliage and the gorgeous little towns. Really, classic New England.

Our third workshop is this Thursday, in a vastly different setting. We will be in the heart of Boston at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. From the registration list, this looks to be a pretty diverse group: public librarians, academic librarians and library students. I am looking forward to doing it again so soon, before I lose the rhythm.

-Hagar

We have finished four workshops here in Missouri and have eight to go-one more this week and seven in the spring. I am happy to report that even though the turn-out has been smaller in some areas than I expected, all of the workshop participants have been very positive in the initial evaluation we distributed. We have had Community Leaders at every workshop and participants have commented that they wished we had more time for the Community Leaders. We might have to make some adjustments in the schedule for the spring round of workshops. I wish that we had videotaped the Community Leader Panel at the Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de las Americas, which is a branch of the Kansas City Public Library. The three panelists that showed up there do more good work in one week than most of us will do in a lifetime and it was humbling to hear about their experiences. One of my panelists yesterday in the St. Louis area reiterated almost verbatim many of the points that are made in the workshop curriculum about making contacts in the Spanish speaking community, which was a lovely coincidence. It turns out that she is the "Dominique" in the St. Louis community-remember the story of Dominique the salsa dancer that Yolanda told us in Seattle? Our "Dominique" in St. Louis is a folkloric dancer whose real job is working for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. She knows everyone and is the person to know. I'm so glad to have made her acquaintance because she has offered to help me find Community Leaders in other areas for future workshops. Yeah! I found a Community Gatekeeper! I hope everyone is enjoying this project as much as we are here in Missouri.


Ann Roberts
Adult Services Consultant
Missouri State Library

A follow up to Ann's post: The Dominique discussed at the workshops was a woman I was trying to track down in Missoula, MT. The people I interviewed referred to her as the "Latin Connection" in Missoula. Unfortunately I have still not been able to contact her. One contact thinks she may have moved back to Costa Rica and the phone number I had for her no longer works. However, I'm glad that you were able to find your "Dominique"!!

Molly

Hi Emily,

You asked me for specific feedback from the academic librarians who attended, and since one of them is a close friend of mine, I asked her directly if she could share her impression of the workshop. She graciously sent me a very articulate description of what she and a coworker thought about the workshop as librarians working in an academic library. I found it to be quite an interesting perspective, and an excellent example of the how effective this model can be for many different types of libraries.

Her name is Whitney Vitale and she is the Information Literacy / Distance Education Librarian at Boston Architectural College Library (http://www.the-bac.edu/). And this is what she wrote:

"During much of the presentation, we both felt that if you replaced the phrase “Spanish speakers” with “undergraduates,” much of what was said could be applicable to either group. The point that especially stood out to us was that if the library is not a friendly and welcoming place, patrons will go elsewhere and learn to “survive” without the library through some other means. Also, when you pointed out that if you don’t grab Spanish Speakers in the first year you will lose them forever, it made us really think about our own outreach to our undergraduate patron group."

"Another area that you focused on that was useful for our thinking about academic libraries was the community leader outreach. We realized, because of this section, that we spend a lot of time assuming what students want instead of going out and asking them what they need. He and I have both been motivated to start planning a thorough needs assessment of our undergraduate community. Also, the point you made about marketing the library beyond just books and information was useful to our academic library thinking."

"The other point that we both picked up on as being useful was that 'If you build it, they will come.' We do need to focus on building relationships within and outside of our academic community. Also, the marketing advice was pretty universally helpful, especially the emphasis on focusing on the people you want to reach, as opposed to focusing on what the library can do."

"In terms of outreach to Spanish speakers specifically, we could see how larger academic libraries with ESL programs such as UMASS or BU could take these ideas and really make them work. Our library will probably not be doing dedicated programming to Spanish speakers any time soon because of many reasons, but I could see the workshop changing the ways we “do business” in subtle ways. Already, the workshop has opened up very enlightening conversations between our Spanish speaking employees and our non-Spanish speaking employees. Also, the idea of more visual marketing as opposed to a reliance on overly wordy marketing can be useful to many of our students for whom English is not their first language. When Silvia (one of the community leader panelists) was talking about having patience with non-English speakers, I was thinking that our desk staff needs to be more aware of their patience levels with students who have heavy accents."

Thanks,
Hagar