I just finished reading Serving Latino Communities: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. I was very impressed with this book. It was straight forward and easy to read. The specific suggestions, such as which distributors to contact would be simple for any library to implement. They covered options from a low budget beginning to a comprehensive service to Latinos program.
Although much of the book seemed to consist of pretty common sense suggestions there were some ideas that stood out to me as being very important. Many of these were covered in my earlier posts. In addition, on page 154 they strongly encourage libraries to include buying for Latinos as a part of their collection development policy. This is important for two reasons. First, it guarantees that serving Latinos is a priority. Secondly, it provides documentation that can be used later when these purchases may be questioned. I also think that it is a valuable point that librarians cannot assume that Latino patrons want information in Spanish (p. 159). In many communities the Latino population is quite fluent in English and may prefer to obtain their information in English.
Most of the chapter on creating a bilingual/bicultural workplace would be relatively easy to implement. However, recruiting Latino board members is a wonderful suggestion that I had not considered.
Finally, chapter 9 on "Obtaining Funding" is a critical component of any library service. Their suggestions for grant writing are particularly appropriate and helpful since these can be an excellent funding source when providing service to an underserved population.
I found this book to be incredibly insightful. It is interesting (and discouraging) that when I went to look for it at my local library I had to have it interlibrary loaned. It came in from the University of Wyoming. Hopefully that does not indicate that Oregon libraries have opted not to purchase it. Maybe it is so popular that it was checked out everywhere. I believe that this is a book that all libraries should have as their own reference tool.
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I'm totally on board. This book was extremely practical. It had great suggestions and resource lists. I loved all the examples. So often we know we need to address a concern, but we don't know how. This book is great because it gives you the how. Even a library that can't afford to attend a conference could probably afford this book and benefit from it.
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