New Initiatives Grant Final Report
“MVCC Reads in Many Languages: Multilingual Collection of Leisure Reading”
Please provide a brief narrative explaining your project and its outcomes.
This project created a whole new collection for us: leisure reading in the 7 most-spoken languages among MVCC’s diverse student body: Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Bosnian, Sgaw Karen, and Burmese (we also acquired one book in Portuguese through donation). This collection extends our heavily-used English-language collection of new popular fiction and nonfiction. The library is a popular hangout spot between classes, and we have a strong relationship with the ESL program, so we frequently get asked for non-English-language books.
We did what we *thought* was comprehensive research prior to applying for the grant, investigating how to search for and catalog items for each language. Prior to the beginning of the grant period, we received three separate donations for the collection, of books in Japanese from a student worker’s family, books in Russian from a community member, and a book in Portuguese from an employee (while we used the grant to target the most-used languages, we are happy to accept donations in other languages to extend the collection, and may use local funds to add additional languages as our student body changes over time). Our efforts to catalog these donations went fairly smoothly; we thought we were prepared! However, we quickly discovered that everything about this collection was much more difficult and time-consuming than our research had suggested. Search engine “filter bubbles” simply refused to return book titles in other languages when we tried to search for them using English-language search terms. Amazon’s international arms turned out to not be included in the college’s Amazon business account, so we could not order from them. In the end we found success by locating online booksellers specializing in each language, either based in or willing to ship to the US. We also sought advice from the Kroch Library at Cornell for Burmese language materials; they were able to confirm that an online bookseller we had found in Singapore was trustworthy and easy to work with. Three Russian books we ordered in early April have yet to arrive, but we ordered The Brothers Karamazov in mid-November and received it in late March, so we still have hope they will show up someday. Because we were not able to order as many items as we expected through the college’s Amazon Business account, we spent considerably more on shipping costs than we anticipated.
Cataloging also presented a lot of unique difficulties. MVCC does not typically catalog anything remotely unusual; nearly 100% of our cataloging is very straightforward copy-cataloging. This collection came as quite a shock to that system! Many of the books we ordered for this collection have no OCLC records, or only had records for translations. About half of the Burmese and Karen titles did not even have ISBNs. Many of the titles across the collection have never been translated into English, so we had to come up with English language titles on our own (to assist with searching). Most of the languages do not use the Latin alphabet, and translation tools struggled with Burmese and Karenni script.
We made liberal use of Google Translate, ChatGPT, and in some cases our relationships with MVCC staff who speak the languages involved. We are fortunate to have a Japanese speaker and a Russian speaker on staff in the library, and have good relationships with a couple of Bosnian speakers employed elsewhere at the college; all four of these staff members provided valuable insight during the project. We learned how to use Google’s phone app to translate writing using the phone’s camera. We often commented that we would not have been able to complete this project a couple of years ago, before the translation technology was in place.
Our original goal was to have the collection largely “ready” for the start of spring semester in January. The unanticipated difficulties with selecting, ordering, receiving, and cataloging meant that we had only a few books in place by the beginning of the spring semester. However, we eventually mastered the learning curve and grew the collection throughout the spring semester. We will be ready to promote this collection more heavily in the fall!
We were able to order a total of 79 books, using the $1,500 New Initiatives Grant and $101.60 of local funding. We also used local funding to purchase 10 clear plexiglass book stands to display some of the books face-out, magnetic shelf labels to label the different languages, and some color printing to promote the collection and solicit title suggestions. We repurposed an existing bookcase to house the collection.
The collection can be viewed on our website here: https://suny-mvc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01SUNY_MVC:01SUNY_MVC&inst=01SUNY_MVC&collectionId=8185331830004842
What is the most remarkable accomplishment or finding of your project?
The most remarkable result of this project is the excitement among both patrons and staff when a patron asks whether we have books in X language, and we are finally able to say YES! A couple of success stories: a very quiet student worker asked a staff member if she could look at the Karen books the day they were placed on the shelf; for the rest of the semester, she was often seen slipping one off the shelf when it was quiet in the library. Near the semester’s end, an advanced ESOL student stopped by the library for help with her research project and left with two Arabic novels under her arm.
Please provide a brief summary of your evaluation activities and/or results, if available.
The first ten or so items in the collection were available for checkout around the beginning of February. The bulk of the collection was purchased and cataloged in March and April, and so were not on the shelf very long before spring semester ended. So far, items from this collection have circulated or been used in-house 16 total times, excluding test checkouts by staff to ensure we had the circulation rules set up properly. Considering that we have not started to widely promote this collection yet, we consider this very promising!
Since 8-1-23, we have also recorded at least 7 reference questions that we were able to answer using the new collection (some of the earlier questions were answered with, “coming soon!”).
We received four title suggestions from students or community borrowers and were able to purchase all 4: Brothers Karamazov and White Fang in Russian (different requesters), Sarajevo Blues in Bosnian, and La Novela del Verano in Spanish.
A couple of students reported to staff that they do not get to use their native language much anymore and appreciate the opportunity to keep up their skills.
Another, older, student was grateful for materials to share with her children (presumably teenagers: the items we purchased were written for teens or adults).
Claire Ehrlich
Reference and Instruction Librarian, Mohawk Valley Community College
CLRC is excited to announce our new Catalyst Grants to replace our previous New Initiatives Grants! Check out the grant page for the rules & requirements!