Hedberg Public Library Visit: Collection Development

Yesterday I took a trip down to Janesville, WI, an hour's drive or so from Madison.  I had made contact with René Bue earlier in the summer about coming to the Hedberg Public Library to shadow her for the day.  I first met René when she came to talk to the UW campus chapter of REFORMA about her position as Bilingual Outreach Coordinator.  Her passion for her work really inspired me then, so I was glad that I had the chance to reconnect with her this summer.

We started out the day by walking through the collection and chatting about collection development tips.  It was great to see so many of the concepts I had read about over the summer in action!  Here is a list of some of her major points:

• Children's Collection:  
• René said she has steered away from buying translations of English children's books, especially series like "Fancy Nancy" because as she said it, "Latinos don't know who Fancy Nancy is!"  Not to mention that many of the translations are poor quality...  In both the adult collection and the children's collection, she tries to buy a representative sample of authors that reflect the demographic makeup of the community.  
• René said that the Pura Belpré Awards and Americás Award are great jumping off places, and she loves the titles they choose, but her concern is that they are choosing the same authors year after year, rather than encouraging lesser known writers.  But she said that the Latino Book Awards are starting to fill that gap, fortunately.  
• As she mentioned multiple times throughout our interaction, René talked about the importance of "knowing your community" (which may be the number one take away message I get from my MLS education!) in terms of the children's collection.  A new Spanish immersion program will begin in a few years at one of the elementary schools, and she knew that teachers would be referring their students to the public library collection, as the Spanish school library collections in the city are notoriously lacking.  So, she said that with that in mind, she will stray from her usual collection development "rules" by adding more translations of series like "Fancy Nancy" and other popular English language titles, since she was predicting that the immersion school students and their parents would appreciate seeing more familiar titles that they could cross-reference with the English versions.  
• The children's collection also contained a small music section, with the ever popular José Luis Orozco, who has many albums of fun folkloric and educational songs. 
• Adult Collection:  
• Since the library has moved towards a "neighborhood" organization, where all the forms of media related to a topic are displayed, all Spanish AV, Fiction, Periodicals, and Non-fiction are located at the front of the library.  Sidebar: René mentioned that location is key; the collection should be have prominent signage and be easily visible when walking into the library.  When she first started her job, she specifically separated out all the original language Spanish films for display in the Spanish section, and their circ stats jumped.  There is also a "community resource center" display next to the collection with Spanish-language brochures for local organizations and copies of Spanish-language newspapers.
• In terms of AV, she has multiple sets of the "Sin Barreras" series, which I had come across many times in my reading as an ESL resource that many Latinos trust and are familiar with. She said they are especially popular.  
• I have been intrigued by fotonovelas ever since I wrote a post about them earlier in the summer, and it was cool to see a collection in action; she has a subscription with Latin American Periodicals  and they send her new titles each month (she tries to keep has six months worth of each title on display at a time).  When I mentioned what I had read about controversies in other libraries, she said that she has only had a few complaints about the sometimes "scandalous" covers but nothing too major.  
• One of the most import take away points I got from our time in the adult section was the fact that René emphasized that the fiction collection should never be as large as the non-fiction, unless your library is located in a large city.  The fiction section at Hedburg is about half the size of the non-fiction, which she feels is a good balance for the community. In terms of her buying guidelines, she rarely buys anything over 400 pages.
• She has found that Latinos usually don't rely on the catalog in the library, instead they browse.  So she changed the top rows of the non-fiction shelving to face-out display, which has increased circ of many items.

And then we adjourned to a meeting room to talk more in depth about policies and programming...