Multicultural Working Group Meeting

25th February 2021, Held at State Library, attended via Zoom.

Business arising

• Positions still pending for Secretary/Chair
• Strategic plan 2017-2021 needs review, the proposed seminar for 2021 has been put o hold due to COVID

Diversity in Children picture book survey –

• Oriana said it is interesting for us to look at our multilingual collection to see if there is diversity in them. She is interested in recommendations for Australian author and content e.g. parents of same gender, different nationality, religion.
• Katherine from Randwick – books with more text, their collection for bilingual pre-school, harder once they are at school.
• Mantra bilingual books diverse titles – Global Books @ Castle Hill English language titles translated.

Updating multilingual signage

• Oriana has visited and not seen many signs around.
• Is it worth spending the money on new signs.
• Please ask the librarian for language books
• Please ask at your local public library – sign – can be shared in community newspapers
• Welcome signage can be used in electronic signage or printed and displayed as a poster
• Up to staff at desk to assist people after they have seen the sign and want books in their language

Marketing and Promotion distribution plan and second stage

Booklet pamphlet 50 copies sent. We can give to the CMRC to give to their clients

Romanian/Telugu

New collection Telugu to be created next financial year. Romanian will be retired once this has been established due to dis-use.

Bulk Loan

Staffing update - down to 2 LAs processing requests. Michael left, they are trying to recruit a part-time LA.

Expected turnaround time – 5-8 working days due to limited days onsite for staff. Some requests may take longer to ful fil due to supply shortage

Encouraged to return overdue loans to fulfil other requests.

New Request Form

Send any feedback.

Please do not be too specific in your requests

Difficult to select items based on titles or authors as they can’t read the language

Feedback – what is helpful is definitely age range or preferred interests – subjects/genres

They don’t go into catalogue for specific requests just by sight.

Please try to get this or something similar is fine.

$10,000 worth of Persian coming from Tehran.

They will provide what they can in a genre if they don’t have enough they will add other genres to fill request

Stocktake of Long-term loans LP and TB

14 libraries waiting to hear back from. – Contact Joana to let her know it should be sent to me.

Once stocktake is complete she can look at a swap of collections

Replacement $45 plus GST they try not to burden us with cost, 3yrs or newer we might be charged.

Specific titles request is a trial. If we request any provide her with feedback to see how it goes

The stress on their collection may be increasing due to demand. Is this because libraries are losing their LOTE budgets or budgets shrinking.

Donations increase the cataloguing budget which is separate to the collections budget. Donations must be something that libraries would accept for their own collections.

Tech Savvy Seniors

Some funding left over for additional programs

Will be sending out an email to see if anyone wants more

Information sharing

Cantonese – Vaccination information, Domestic/family violence – Podcasts in Mandarin and Cantonese at Parramatta

Slowly reintroducing in person programs

ECC coming back due to high demand

IELTS workshops

Job seeker workshops

eResources – videos promoting classic literature collection, presented in a different way to introduce them to people that may feel intimidated

Multicultural collection and bulk loans to be their next promotion

Randwick – started in person programs in January

2 online, 2 in person English classes – covid safe

Lantern making workshop – pretty well attended – 26 out of 30

Harmony day 2 craft sessions for children – harmony chain for display after all finished

Vox books Mandarin – books that can talk. They are American. A book with a button, it will read the story to you when you turn the page

• Unordered List ItemFairfield City Open Libraries is with CloudLink for eBooks and so also Camden Council Library & New Castle Libraries providing access to customers in accessing the collection from all 3 libraries.  Wanted to exchange thoughts on what is working or not working as we are purchasing our LOTE eBooks though CloudLibrary.
• Unordered List ItemWanted to share the link for free Arabic Collections online at http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/, we re providing this link on our library webpage.
• Unordered List ItemThis is a publicly available Arabic collection Online (ACO) Established with support from NYU Abu Dhabi, and currently supported by major grants from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and Carnegie Corporation of New York, this mass digitization project aims to feature up to 23,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions. These institutions are contributing published books in all fields—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections

Next meeting topics for an online seminar