15 posts tagged “outreach”

(Crossposted from my professional blog, The Gypsy Librarian).

I bet my four readers at The Gypsy Librarian were expecting the next installment in my small series on blogging mistakes and library blogs (first installment here). I am taking a break today to highlight a very important issue as well as let my four readers know about some of the good work going on in my campus. Ok, this is kind of to let people know where I was last night too. The series will resume next Friday.

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October domestic violence purple_ribbon

 

October has a few observances associated with it. One of those observances is Domestic Violence Awareness Month (link to President Obama's proclamation). Last night I attended a candlelight vigil held on our campus to recognize the issue of domestic violence and to educate people. The event took place at 7:00pm last night in the fourth floor meeting room of the library. They were going to do it outdoors, but the weather did not cooperate. Nevertheless the event was successful, and from a quick glance, I think we had about 50 people or so. We did get some representatives from our campus police, a very strong Greek presence (ladies and gents), and some students. I was the only representative of the library present. The room's lights were down, and the room was lit with candles. At the entrance, there was a display with educational materials.

The event started with an opening statement by Ms. Samantha Dwight, who among her many hats has done work for the Campus Assault Response Effort (CARE) and is an educator/facilitator/presenter extraordinaire on this and other gender issues. She does a bit of everything, so if she reads this I apologize in advance if I can't quite "put her in a slot." At any rate, she read a statement, including a recognition of the important role that law enforcement officers have in domestic violence prevention. Those men and women in uniform when they get a call never know what they may be walking into. So our thanks go to them.

Next, the ladies of Alpha Chi Omega took the stage and did a dramatic reading. Members of the sorority took turns reading statistics and facts related to domestic violence in the nation. This had a moving effect on the crowd, and we learned a thing or two in the process. The last member on stage sang a song.

The activity would come to an end as a prayer was said for the victims as well as those involved in caring for them as well as for us all. And silently the event closed.

Whenever possible, I think it is important for me to attend events like this. In my role as outreach librarian, this is another way for me to reach out to our campus community, another way for the library to say present and that we support the cause. Personally, I just think this is important and needs to be supported. We have a long way to go in educating people, and events like this are a way to do it.

I would like to wrap this up by offering some links and resources that I hope people will find useful. Please, if you happen to be a victim, or you know someone who is, know that there is help out there. Some of the links will include phone numbers and contacts. On our campus here, the folks at C.A.R.E. are one such resource. Need more information, and you are local, you can contact them, or you can contact me, and I will refer you to the right place or find you the information you may need.

The resources then:

• The Domestic Violence Awareness Project. These are the folks who promote and maintain activities for the observance, which started as an awareness "Day of Unity" back in October of 1981. The Project is coordinated by the National Center on Domestic Violence. You can learn about campaigns, find educational materials, and get links, and phone numbers if you need help. Of course, if you are in imminent danger, dial 911.
  
• The National Coalition on Against Domestic Violence. Among the things this organization does, "the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), in conjunction with Ms. Magazine, started the Remember My Name project in 1994 to create a national registry of names of those who have lost their lives to domestic violence. Since then, NCADV has continued to collect information on incidents of people who have been killed by an intimate partner and produces a poster each year for Domestic Violence Awareness Month listing the names of those submitted to the project. To date, over 7,753 people have been memorialized through the project." Names are added daily to the list, which you can view on the website.
  
• The U.S. Department of Justice has an Office on Violence Against Women. In addition to listing national hotlines, the site contains a lot of good information, including statistics.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a handbook on domestic violence awareness. This seems geared to employers so they can be supportive in the workplace. Provides some good information.
• The National Domestic Violence Hotline. The number is 1−800−799−SAFE (7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224. Their contact form can also be used to get assistance if you prefer, though they encourage calling more. You can also find some information on the site.
  
• The National Youth Violence Prevention Center also has resources related to the observance here. Yes, it is not just spouses or significant others; children and youths in families where an abusive situation exists suffer too.
• The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) is also a good resource.
• In Texas, the Attorney General has some resources here. A bit more geared to sexual assault, but still good information.
• There is also a Texas Council on Family Violence.
• Locally, you have the good folks of the East Texas Crisis Center. If you need help locally, this is a place to go.
  

This small list is certainly not comprehensive. I have tried to put out some resources that I have looked over and seem to provide good information. Readers are invited to comment, respond, and if they have other suggestions for links, add in the comments as well.

And yes, I tagged the post under "celebrations and holidays." It is not because I think domestic violence is to be celebrated; it is not. But this is also about a monthly observance, which is what I use the tag for. Just to be clear.

The observance ends on October 15, but clearly there is still a lot of work to do in the Latino community to get ahead, if some of these stories are any indication. While I think that the observance is important, we should not just focus on all the positives. As a community, we need to also look at what more needs to be done.

• USA Today reported on Hispanic students facing barriers to get a higher education. This article is drawing on research from the Pew Hispanic Center. Here is the study "Latinos and Education: Explaining the Attainment Gap," from which the article seems to be drawing information. This other report on "The Changing Pathways of Hispanic Youths into Adulthood" may also be of interest in the context of the newspaper article. Overall the message is that more needs to be done to make college more accessible to Latinos. Then again, it needs to be more accessible overall.
  
• The National Council of La Raza has released an analysis of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. It "finds that while necessary, the new rules do not sufficiently improve the law to help Latino students." You can get a link to the full study at the site. 
• The Census Bureau has made available national-level tabulations from the Current Population Survey on "Hispanic Population in the United States: 2007 and 2008." These are provided as Excel sheets, so keep that in mind, but you can get the data and then use it for research.
  

And under other links that I want to highlight. These are additional links I wanted to highlight in a post for the library blog, but sadly, I ran out of time to organize and make a post. So consider this a sort of

• The Pura Belpre Award. "The Pura Belpré Award, established in 1996, is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth" (from the ALA Website).
  
• And here is the Americas Book Award. It is "given in recognition of U.S. works of fiction, poetry, folklore, or selected non-fiction (from picture books to works for young adults) published in the previous year in English or Spanish that authentically and engagingly portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States." The award is sponsored by the national Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP).
• A cool resource from the Library of Congress's American Memory Project: Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B Rael Collection.  It documents "religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado." 

Overall, I found some very interesting things this year, and I wish I would have had a bit more time to share them with folks. Oh well, there is always next year.

I finally managed to put up our display for Hispanic Heritage Month in our library. We are fortunate because we got a nice traveling exhibit from Humanities Texas, which I put up after the crates arrived, with a little help from a most helpful colleague. Anyhow, I also created a book display, which goes along with the traveling display and also helps highlight the observance. I hope to get a post with some links and resources to post on our library blog, but I have a bunch of other things going on. Thus I am making this post with some links and notes, so I can draw from it later. If anyone finds this useful, feel free to link or make your own notes as well.

• From the Pew Hispanic Center, a report on "Hispanics, Health Insurance, and Health Care Access." This struck me as interesting and relevant. I did not want to post about it in the library blog until I had time to read it over. I do trust Pew as a source, but knowing the local politics, I better read it before I post it over there. H/T to Docuticker.
  
• From President Obama's White House blog, "Todos Somos Americanos," notes on the President's remarks to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. You can get a link to the actual remarks and some photos. Actually, the President's blog is a pretty good resource to see what the President is doing, and it is informative as well. One of the nicer government 2.0 initiatives. Also from the blog, the text of the Presidential Proclamation for Hispanic Heritage Month, in Spanish. Here is the English version. I used the English version on the display, but I did not find the Spanish one right away. I am going to see if I can print it, make it look nice, and add it in.
  
• Database and reference works provider Gale has some resources for Hispanic Heritage Month here. 
• The Law Library of Congress has a guide of resources for National Hispanic Heritage Month over here. 
• The Census Bureau has their fact sheet for the observance here. I used some of the facts on the sheet to go with my book display at the library.
  
• From NASA, the Latina Women of NASA. It does sound like some Playboy pictorial, but it is actually a nice set of links with Latina astronauts as well as other Latinas working at NASA. Good for inspirational material.
  
• Here is a page from the Smithsonian's Education Portal for Hispanic Heritage Month. 
• If you want a reading list, the Florida Department of Education has a small list of recommended readings by grade level. 
• The National Park Service has a page for the month as well here. 
• PBS has a page listing programming related to the observance here. As the jingle goes, "check your local listings." 

A sampling of what some universities are doing. I did a search on our own university website, and there was absolutely no reference to any event or even recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month on the campus website. The only references are what the library is doing, and you can find it on our blog, which is linked in our website. Otherwise, it is pretty much as if the observance did not exist, which, given this is Texas, which has a pretty big Latino population, you would think someone would notice. At least here at the library, we (mostly me) did our part. But I wanted to look around and see what other universities might be doing. This is a sampling of what I found doing a quick Google search limited to .edu domains:

•  List of events at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
  
• Here is what Ohio University is doing. Sure, we are nowhere in the league of Ohio University, but if some college in Ohio can notice, why can't we?
  
• Houston Community College's highlights of activities (this is a video). 
• Here is the list of events at Texas A&M, from their Department of Multicultural Services. The list of campus sponsors caught my eye. I have my work cut out for me if I want to have a campus department or two help sponsor some kind of event.
  
• Even in Kansas they observe the event, and at University of Kansas, they keep going until early November.
  
• Loyola University in Chicago has some interesting events too. 
• And this is what they did at my old stomping ground, Indiana University.
  

If nothing else, these lists give me some ideas of things to work on for the future. I have to keep reminding myself that Rome was not built in a day.
 

These are some links I am finding related to Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month. Some I will use for display materials, and others I will highlight in a blog post for the library. This here is just a holding space for all the items, i.e. for reference purposes. However, if anyone finds them useful, take a look as well.

• From EDSITEment, feature on Asian-Pacific Heritage Month. This has some lesson plans for teachers and links. 
• From California State University-Sacramento Library, the Japanese American Archival Collection. I still need to look over this, but it looks like a valuable resource.
  
• Banana: A Chinese America Experience, an online exhibit. From the about page: "Together, these works examine the influences which shape the lives of Chinese American youths in the U.S. The web site and the exhibition reconstruct the apartment of the fictional Lee family, second-generation Chinese Americans presently living in New York City. The Mother came from Hong Kong to the States in the 60s as a student to escape the rigid and competitive educational system there. Living with relatives, she was cut off from her parents and culture. As a Parachute kid who (metaphorically) landed in America, her experiences differed from her son¹s, who was born in New York, an Americanized Banana--yellow on the outside and white on the inside." This exhibit is from the Tenement Museum. 
• Site of the town of Locke, California, that, according to the LII, "Website for this California delta town founded in 1915, which is "the only town in the United States built exclusively by the Chinese for the Chinese." Features brief history and photos of points of interest such as the boarding house, Chinese School, and Dai Loy Museum (a former gambling house that was closed by state authorities in the 1950s."
  
• From the UC Irvine Libraries, SEAADoc: Documenting the Southeast Asian American Experience. From the website, "is an educational resource of the Southeast Asian Archive at the UC Irvine Libraries focusing on post-1975 refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and the communities they have developed in the United States. It contains 1,500 visual images and 4,000 pages of searchable text selected from the Archive to represent a cross section of our holdings."
  
• Site of the project Children of the Atomic Bomb, "is a research website project developed by Dr. James N. Yamazaki, UCLA professor emeritus of pediatrics, together with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center" (from the website). I have to admit that this looks very interesting, but a part of me does worry that at least one person in my community may get a little sensitive (I do live in East Texas). I may put the link with a comment in the blog post anyways.
  
• From Library and Archives Canada, an online exhibit on "The Early Chinese Canadians: 1858-1947." I have to admit that I find interesting how the Canadians, their government especially, have managed to put out some neat things for this theme. American governmental agencies mostly have the usual proclamations and basic promotional stuff, but something like this is rare. 
• This I really need to look over. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) recently released the Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific 2008. From the looks of it, you can download the whole thing as a PDF, or you can read the tables as EXCEL files. I think there is a lot of potential for some of these UN publications in terms of reference work. Something to look into, but this I can add to my blog post/guide on Asian Pacific American resources.
  
• A small article from Reuters on "Chinese Writers Fail to Find Global Voice." These writers face censorship at home and ignorance about China abroad.
  
• Set of links from the InfoPlease website. 
• The Library of Congress's page on Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. 
• The Smithsonian's Education unit also has one. 
• Scholastic has a little something on Asian Pacific Heritage. 
• The Air Force has a set of posters. I did print out a couple for use on a display.
  
• U.S. Census Facts for Features for the month. '
• The White House Proclamation for Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, 2009. This was not as easy to find. For all the positive raves Obama's Administration gets about being online, transparent, and all 2.0, finding things like this on his White House site is not easy, and there is no "printer friendly" option to print out the document. 
• Read Write Think has some things for teachers. 
• Peace Corps had a press release for the occassion. I thought it was kind of cool, as they recognize some of their volunteers.
  
• The American Consulate in China has some links, mostly to things like LOC. It is interesting to see what they choose to highlight for people overseas to see. 
• From a health point of view, MedlinePlus has a lot of stuff on Asian American health. I think I can use a few of these for display. 
• From the CDC Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities, more information on Asian American health. 
• The National Park Service does have some good information on Asian American topics in National Parks for travel, sites, so on. 
• Information on Asian American Heritage from IMDiversity. This I have to look at a bit more closely.
  
• The Official Declaration of Asian Heritage Month in Canada. A nice image, but no way to get the image in better quality (they do offer the text). 
  
• Resource: The Center for Asian American Media.
  

Update note (5/11/09): Some additional links:

• The Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.
• "Asian American Literature: A Selective Bibliography" out of CSU Stanislaus. 
• "Asian American Literature: Resources for research." Has links to publishers, page done by Dr. Noelle Brada-Williams.
  

This list is going to be part of a larger post I am planning to help me reflect on the whirlwind of activity that was April 2009 for me. I am making the list here, then will link to it from my main blog to keep things short over there. For context, I am putting in a photo of my "tactical board" (or, as others may call it, the "honey do" list) for April 2009, as it looked at the end of the month. I have to say that I got the vast majority of what I listed done (and that includes stuff not on the board that the powers that be requested as well in addition):

AprilTacticalBoard

My director recently gave a newsletter from the IOP. Apparently, they publish a Librarian Insider, and the December 2008 issue had an item on Library Marketing. They did a small interview Ms. Karen Oye, Head of Customer Services of the Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western U. Their library has a news blog here. I need to take a closer look at that blog when I get a chance. A quick glance tells me I may learn a thing or two that could be useful for our library blog here at UT Tyler. Anyhow, here are some things I wanted to jot down:

• On why they do library events: "People multi-task today, and their interests are broad--we can tap into this by holding events in our library." They find this works better than just talking to people as you meet them or sending out flyers. Success comes from getting the attention of people at the event, and it creates social buzz at the library.
  
• Some of the things they do for advertising events are things we do here: we put visuals on our campus plasma screens. We have one in the library, and I have one posted on the University Center's screen. It is a nice resource for uploading flyers. I am intrigued when she says they are networked. Here, I have to create one for ours in the library, then send a copy over to the Student Life folks to post on theirs. Would be nice to have a network, and then I could just upload directly. Word of mouth is still crucial.
  
• Use your in-house talent when possible. I am losing my graphics person to retirement, so that is one talent I will have to start cultivating myself.
  

What I am still wondering is how they manage to actually plan and implement the events. I have a list of events we do every year, and they take a lot of time, especially for one person. I may have to look over their blog and see what they offer.

There were a few things that I would have liked to try out as part of the September Project, but there is only so much time in the day. These are kind of ideas that I jotted down, but I never took far. One or two I may try to do next year.

• I would have liked to have a speaker for Constitution Day. Either a speaker, or maybe some kind of debate around issues of civil rights. I wonder if I could take advantage of the fact we have student organizations for the Democrats and the Republicans on campus. Maybe they would be interested in providing debaters and partner with us. If I could get a professor in political science (or a related area) to moderate, could be a nice idea.
  
• A program or speaker on a topic addressing post 9/11. One sample topic: Democracy/Democratic Governance in the U.S. Another sample topic: "Why I blog and why you should blog." This could be supplementary. We did get a speaker for our film showing, so we now have a start.
  
• Exhibits: We did get some exhibits, but I always have other ideas. One big idea, and this we can consider for next year, was trying to get the "Eyes Wide Open and the Cost of War" exhibit for our campus. I think this could be a powerful exhibit and encourage conversations on campus. This is definitely something to inquire about.
  
• Exhibit on the topic of the "The Othe September 11." This would be September 11, 1973, which is when Pinochet's coup, backed by the CIA, happened in Chile.
  
• Continue showing other films related to the month and events. Showing "Good Night and Good Luck" worked well, even with the small crowd. I am thinking we can show other films. We have available "Fahrenheit 9/11," "World Trade Center," and "United 93" for instance.
  
• I wanted to create a pretty good pathfinder on 9/11 and Terrorism (or something similar in terms of topic). It would incorporate books, resources, and websites. While I have been posting the book lists for books in our displays, making the pathfinder itself was something I just ran out of time on. On the positive, I do have pathfinders I have created on this topic on file. So, modifying one or two to meet needs here would be possible. Again, time was a big obstacle. That, and I am not sure about interest level. We could put it in a new LibGuide (I have seen other campuses do it that way). We'll see. Right now, LibGuides has been a bit of an object of contention locally that I would rather not deal with now.
  
• For the films, have some popcorn, or at least some cookies and soda, or something to munch on.
  
• Serving as voting registration site would have been a good idea. I may have to give this some thought, but not as much of a rush since next year is not an election year. 

These are just some ideas. The September Project website always has many others. Anyhow, this year went pretty well considering it was our first time. I am already looking forward to next year.

Citation for the article:

Sharpless, Susan and Lynn Sutton. "Embedded Librarians: On the Road in the Deep South." C&RL News February 2008: 71-74, 85.

Read via print (forwarded copy)

This is another small note not quite enough to put on the main blog. The only reason I read this was because one of my colleagues forwarded it. The article basically details how two librarians were embedded into a service course at Wake Forest University. The course included a tour of the Deep South and a service component. I am not sure what my colleague had in mind when she forwarded this given that, due to a significant lack of resources, the kind of embedding described in this article (where at least two librarians would be off campus for a substantial amount of time) would not be feasible. However, there is some stuff to learn and consider from the item.

• "Roles envisioned for librarians included research assistance for daily assignments, design and maintenance of the course wiki, blog, and Flickr sites, planning and implementation of the service learning component of the trip, and, most importantly, as additional adult chaperones" (71). Some of this is basic stuff that librarians do already such as the research assistance. For the online stuff, there is a bit of troubleshooting as well as content creation involved. They went ahead and got a Pro account on Flickr, which is something I think my library should do at one point or another in order to make photos a bit more accessible.
  
• This is what the course instructors actually wanted the librarians to do. Notice that when you look at it, it is quite a bit of work:
  
• "provide resource lists to assist students with research guidance on the topics they were assigned to study."
  
• "offer a full range of technology support from troubleshooting hotel Internet access to facilitating daily postings onto the course website. . ." [the tech support seemed a bit much, but what I think is librarian comfort level. Because as much as the techie librarians love to portray themselves as technomavens, there are a good number of good librarians who are not necessarily technogeeks]
• "plan the service component of the trip at the Hancock County Library System" (72).
  
• Important to point out that their library is "the primary source for computer training for both faculty and students, and [they] participate in many campus technology initiatives" (73). I am not sure who is the primary source for computer training on our campus, but it is not us. In my former MPOW, there was a Teaching and Learning Center for the faculty to get computer training, but to be honest, they did not have much for the students there. We do not have a whole lot for the students here either aside from a set of online tutorials the university buys from a provider to learn things like how to use a Powerpoint. I am not saying this to be negative on MPOW, but it is a fact of reality that we provide a small computer lab, but no other training (aside from BI, but that is different). Again, even if we wanted to, we would not be able to be "primary source" for computer training.
  
• What I liked was that the librarians participated and wrote their own reflections as well as part of the experience.
  

Anyhow, a nice idea, but it seems a bit of wishful thinking at this stage.

Meredith Farkas recently delivered a talk on the topic of 2.0 and academic libraries, and she put up her presentation's slides. On the one hand, I tend to dislike looking at slides when people post them up like that because there is no context; I have no idea very often what people said to go with the slides. On the other hand, I happen to like this presentation because it has a lot of examples of things other libraries are doing. There are a few things I see that I would not mind trying. At the moment, what is stopping me is time and possible buy-in from others. Anyhow, for now, just wanted to keep track of this.

And by the way, I really need to consider how to use Slideshare. Seems like a nice little tool that could be useful.

Other items, while I am making notes:

• "100 Free Library 2.0 Webinars and Tutorials."
  
• Sarah Houghton-Jan's presentation on "Online Marketing for Academic Libraries." (link goes to her blog, where she links the presentation as a PDF). Some possible ideas here as well. She also did an "Online Marketing for Libraries" (link to her blog for various viewing options) webcast for OPAL. I have to take some time to watch it (assuming I can get it to work on my non-admininstrative privileged computer. I am still not happy over the fact I was not able to make some SirsiDynix webinar work here at MPOW because of that paranoid nonsense they got here on my campus).
  

I was cleaning the mess in my desk. I had a big pile of things that simply needed to be put away, and I finally put some order to the chaos. Anyhow, I came across a handwritten sheet of paper, which turned out to be some reading notes. However, I did not jot down the book it came from, so it took me a bit of time to figure it out. Anyhow, it turns out it was a book I had started reading over as part of work. Things got busy, as they often do, and I had to drop the book. The sheet of paper joined the pile of other things (mostly materials from displays I have taken down but had not put away). So, I am jotting the notes here.

The book I was referring to, which I have to get back to as soon as I can, is the following:

Wolfe, Lisa A. Library Public Relations, Promotions, and Communications. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1997.

My short notes then:

"Typically, the successful libraries are those that have been telling their stories for years. They have developed strong programs and have worked hard to let their constituents know the value of library services. Then, when the day comes that those services need protection, there is an educated constituency that values the lirbrary and its services--constituents who not only see libraries as an American value, but who see their library as a community value" (from Preface, ix).

To which I replied:

• It lays it a bit thick at the end, but it makes an important point. We can't take our libraries and services for granted. We need to show our value and educate people on that value. Here's the idea again: we need to tell our story.
  

Here was something else I questioned, also from the Preface:

"If you want people to know that your library has serious budgetary problems, then all your communications efforts should emphasize how you are doing so much with so little" (x).

My reply:

• The cynic in me just thinks that's an opening for the higher ups to freeze the budget or cut it down further.