Serving New Immigrant Communities in the Library

(Paperback)

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Description

Build strong bridges with new members of your community. With this insightful guide, you will learn how to assess your current organizational performance with immigrants, gather data, and use that information to gain support for organizational initiatives. You will also discover how to adapt policies to better fit changing needs, overcome language barriers, develop public relations strategies that reach immigrants, and build culturally relevant collections, services, and programs for a changing community. Filled with quotes, anecdotes, and profiles from the author's research with immigrant communities, the book provides both a positive vision and practical plan for serving immigrants in your library, school, or organization.

Reviews

Serving New Immigrant Communities in the Library offers a guide to developing library services for new immigrant communities.This is a well researched book, documented in the 20-page Selected Bibliography. It is enriched with anecdotes and profiles from the author's research and experience with immigrant communities. It is recommended for all libraries that serve immigrant communities. * Technicalities *
Cuban provides a guide for librarians interested in developing their institution's services for new immigrant communities. Coverage includes knowing and planning for new immigrants' needs, assessing community needs and assets, gathering resources for serving new immigrant communities, communicating competently with new immigrant communities, changing library policies to meet new needs, accommodating new immigrants with library services, building multicultural collections for new immigrant communities, and connecting new immigrants to learning opportunities. * Reference & Research Book News *
While the author does not suggest specific services and programs, she provides some core topics with which to design the programs and services around, such as literacy and business and career subjects. In the last chapter of the book, 'Final Thoughts' the author reemphasizes that the key to serving immigrant populations is in knowing exactly who these populations are and learning how to effectively assess this specific communities' special needs. In general, any library looking to provide or improve services to their immigrant populations will get a wealth of information from this book and learn the very important initial steps of how to identify the specific population and its specific needs. * Colorado Association of Libraries *

Author Bio

Sondra Cuban is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University, England. A former ESOL and ABE teacher, she also worked as a librarian in Hawai'i.