Latinx Heritage Month in the TMC

I imagine this blog has readers from all kinds of libraries. Sujei and I are both librarians but in very different types of libraries. If you follow Sujei on any social media platform, you’ll see photos of the programming she does for El día de los niños/El día de los libros, for storywalks, for gardening in her library and so much more! I get the feeling that her desk is situated in the middle of a very vibrant and engaging space.

I work in an academic library that has a focus on supporting student success; our programming is limited. I’ve been the liaison to our Bayh College of Education since I arrived here, and in that capacity, I also manage our Teaching Materials Collection (TMC). This area is designed to familiarize our pre-service educators with a school library; it even uses the Dewey decimal system rather than the Library of Congress (LOC) system that’s in the rest of the library. The area contains books for children ages 0-18, textbooks, and professional development books.

This year, I’ve chosen to use that area to observe Latinx Heritage Month by creating booklists for our library users. The lists highlight books written by Latinx authors in our collection, each on a different topic. These will be particularly helpful because there’s no library staff based in that area.

Creating booklists is one way I not only become familiar with what’s in my collection, but also with Latinx culture. The first guide I created was for books about Latinx history. To find books for the list, I began by keyword searching the catalog for ‘Latinx history’ but, I also had to search for ‘Latino history’ and ‘Hispanic history’. Because I know the largest groups of Latinx in the United States historically have been from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Cuba, I used those countries in my next search. Then I began looking for Haiti or Haitian, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala or Guatemalan… books on history. This project quickly becomes a nice geography lesson!

As I moved on to create the next list for poetry and novels in verse, and then another for graphic novels, I began doing some collection analysis work. I realized how few books I have outside those three main country groups and how aged my collection is. My budget is tight! This means I have to be strategic with my purchasing and work to add what’s missing. Doing work like this is a good way to help me see my gaps. There is a vendor that actually has a tool to do collection analysis work and that would be a good way to get a look at the entire collection. I can’t remember which one it is, though.

I’m not particularly artistic, but I do my best. I picked up some copyright-free designs and used Canva to develop a layout for my bifold pamphlet. I don’t think it’s a tremendously complicated project, but fussing with the design and layout can be time-consuming. Anything out of alignment can ruin the aesthetic, thus the perceived value of my work, as can the typos, which I am horrible at finding. I’ve been using Grammarly for spell checks, and it does help some. A second pair of eyes can be good, especially on public-facing work. I’d appreciate any suggestions on finding the typos.

Doing this particular work to celebrate heritage months in our library is a meaningful way to increase my knowledge on so many levels. I learn about the various cultures and about my collection. I become familiar with more authors and learn a little about their backgrounds.

I could have also polled library students for books to add to the list or combined the booklist with Sujei’s work to come up with a reading challenge. Perhaps you have other ways of building and using book lists? I think a lot of librarians create booklists for our users but, we forget how valuable they are to us and to our users.

Filed under: Programs/Programming, Uncategorized