The Lakeshore Technical College Library, like many Wisconsin libraries, has traditionally been a monolingual space, operating exclusively in English. However, we recognize that our students, staff, and community members represent an increasingly diverse range of linguistic identities. Now, thanks to the WiLS Ideas to Action Fund, we are able to address this gap by creating a multilingual learning environment that celebrates linguistic diversity and provides services, programming, and resources to our patrons in their first or heritage languages.
After gathering input from stakeholders across campus, our “Multilingual Library” initiative was set into motion in October 2022 with a three-pronged approach that specifically focuses on expanding offerings in two of the most common languages spoken by our students: Spanish and Hmong.
Our first goal was to increase access by translating key service documents – such as our Equipment Agreement Checkout form, user experience surveys, and library policies into Spanish and Hmong to ensure all patrons are aware of library expectations, able to navigate resources, and able to give feedback on library services in their preferred language. We had success in partnering with an external service and were able to translate even more documents than we originally expected. Thus far, our translated materials include library notices, resource brochures, public-facing policies, and forms that require signature. As we look toward the second half of our initiative, we hope to publicly collocate these materials so that others can use and adapt them.
Our second goal was to offer programs that build an inclusive, welcoming community on campus for multilingual students and their families. We formed partnerships with our Lakeshore CCAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents In School) program, our Office of Access, Equity, and Inclusion, and our StudentSHARE program to provide virtual bilingual story times in Spanish and Hmong for students and their families. The events were a rousing success and families were provided a copy of the bilingual book to keep, an activity kit, and a meal kit related to the story. You can find a sample of the lesson plan, resources, and activities we used for our Hmong-English story time here!
Finally, we wanted to curate a small collection of recreational and foundational materials in each major career area in Spanish and Hmong to ensure students can explore their interests, degree programs, and the basics of their career path in the language that is most accessible to them. We will spend the Spring and Summer focusing on this goal, with the intention of providing publicly available booklists for any colleges looking to expand their multilingual collections.
While we’ve been proud of the successes we have had in creating new bilingual programming and translating our service materials, we continue to look toward our goals for the second half of our initiative. We aim to create a process for maintaining and updating our translated documents, launch more multilingual programs to engage our community, curate a multilingual collection, and compile a hub of resources for libraries hoping to undertake similar projects. Language is an ever-evolving entity, so it follows that this work will never truly be done, but thanks to Ideas to Action it has officially begun at Lakeshore Technical College Library.