Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

"...and they coexisted happily ever after."
April 14, 2008

A news item out of Oregon last week isn't likely to thrill you with the first part of its headline ("Spanish, English coexist at libraries"--that one belongs in the dog-bites-man pile by now, right?) but the rest of the story brings welcome news: "Ashland branch steps up its efforts for bilingual readers."

The article highlights the work one beleaguered library system has been doing to get good bilingual books for children into more of its branches.  It also serves as an enticing introduction for readers who are unfamiliar with such books:

Increasingly, the Ashland Public Library is becoming a place where...any family that wants to raise multilingual children can get help in those efforts.

Most Spanish-language and bilingual books used to be concentrated at Jackson County's main branch in Medford. But librarians are making more of an effort to make those books available countywide, said Perii Hauschild-Owen, a librarian in the Ashland Public Library's children's department.

As a result, the Ashland branch is building its bilingual collection and adding new, vividly illustrated books in the children's department.

In past years, the children's department mainly had books that were written only in Spanish and were translations of popular kids' books first written in English, Hauschild-Owen said.

Some of those books didn't translate well at all...[but] a new generation of books features both English and Spanish on the pages. The stories are often derived from Latin American folk tales and customs.  Even the illustrations help convey a sense of the culture...

Ashland is a special town, home to a theater festival that's known up and down the West Coast.  But Jackson County is notorious in the library world for another reason.  Troubles in the region's timber economy put the county's libraries on the skids.  Late last year management of the system was turned over to LSSI, whose corporate office is nearly 3,000 miles away.

There's a lot to argue about wherever outsourcing rears its head.  Certainly the notion that local selectors and managers make the best-informed collection decisions has a lot of hometown appeal.  But here is some anecdotal evidence, anyway, that things don't always work that way with Libraryville's more marginalized collections.

Posted by Bruce Jensen on April 14, 2008 | Comments (0)