Recently in Libraries Category

A report from Elisee:

Comme prévue, j'ai effectué un déplacement a Pobé le mercredi 23 février pour voir l'état d'avancement de la bibliothèque.   Le bâtiment est totalement refait, il se compose de 4 pièces. La salle de lecture est spacieuse et les étagères y sont déjà disposées ainsi que les premiers livres.  J'ai discuté avec Adama Sawadogo - l' antiquaire et membre du comité de gestion qui a beaucoup soutenu le projet de bibliothèque - il dit qu'avec Emilie et les autres membres du comité ils sont convenus de lancement officielle des activité de la bibliothèque le 3 ou le 4 Avril 2010 en fonction de la disponibilité des uns et des autres. Je note egalement Adama, très enthousiaste, a promis de faire construire un hangar sur la terrasse de la bibliothèque.

That is Emilie Crofton, peace Corps volunteer, in the photo below.  They need some kind friends to send appropriate books and some appropriate posters (not Michael Jackson, please...).  Actually, I believe Emilie is in Ouagadougou buying a second lot of books now.

Emilie Crofton, a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso, has been working very hard all year to start a library in Pobe-Mengao, in northern Burkina Faso.  Yesterday she learned that the library received a grant of $2,000 from the ex-Peace Corps association, Friends of Burkina Faso.  That put the total fundraising for Pobe-Mengao above the $10,000 threshold that FAVL has for becoming a full-fledged FAVL-managed library. 

We're very excited, and welcome the library to the Burkina Faso group- now numbering eight (Pobe, Bereba, Koumbia, Karaba, Sara, Dohoun, Dimikuy, and Boni).  Wow! 

This is FAVL's 9th year, and if someone had asked me in 2001 whether in 2010 we would be operating eight libraries, very successfully, in Burkina Faso, I would have been skeptical.  Not to mention libraries in Ghana, Uganda  and Tanzania, and the growing-like-gangbusters Uganda Community Libraries Association...  Lots of hard work and dedication by all.

A message from Casey.  He and the Leo librarian did a training with FAVL staff at Bereba library... will be something to continue to follow!

Hello everyone,

I've attached some pictures of our library opening last week as well as some general pictures of the library.  There will be more to come very soon.  I would again like to thank everyone for your contribution and support in making this library a reality for our community.


Regards,

Casey Kean
Peace Corps Volunteer
Leo, Burkina Faso

People involved in community and school library projects in rural Africa know, from visiting them, that there are plenty of "libraries" (cupboards, shelves, one room affairs full of dust, closets packed full of Texas Board of Education cast-offs) that even a glance tells you have no effect on the reading population that is the target for the library.  But more often the impact is intermediate, and a glance will not suffice.  So how to tell whether the library is having an impact?  And what if the donor demands that you have an impact assessment plan?  What should you include?  Here is my first cut of presenting library impact.

1. Photos.  If you don't have a picture of the library, with users reading books, then get one.  Then plan on how you are going to get one or two more photos every couple months.  I think a photo like this one speaks for itself, especially in a library that has been around for a few years and a blog site is steadily posting pictures like this.   Anyone can fake statistics, but in a village setting it is pretty hard to repeatedly fake pictures like this by opening the library once a month and posing kids reading.  Obviously it can be done- remember the faked moon landing?
   
2. Testimony from "neutral" visitors.  Every six months or so someone should be visiting the library to make sure that it has the appearance of functioning.  If your visitor clearly finds a library obviously locked and no librarian, it is unlikely to be having an impact.  The surest test is whether while visiting the library someone comes in and acts as if coming in were normal (rather than asking "What is this place?").  When I was visiting Sara library last fall, in Burkina Faso, a gendarme came in to return a book by Ahmadou Kourouma, and then grabbed another to check out.  I chatted with him a bit... he checked out a novel a week... all he did as a gendarme was sit by the side of the road watching traffic and waiting for trouble...  Did I need to measure how reading the books was "impacting" his life?  Did I worry that maybe the librarian had paid him to "fake it"?  No.  Reading Ahmadou Kourouma can't be faked.  Look to see whether kids walk in and grab a book.  if they do, then clearly they are used to the place.  Village kids are generally very shy around formal structures like libraries, and it takes a while for them to feel comfortable.  Do they take off their shoes at the door?  Do they lower the tone of their voices?  Great signs that they are used to the place.
   
3. Monthly librarian reports.  The first obvious requirement for measuring impact.  According to the librarian, how many readers does the library receive broken down by age and gender.  How many books are checked out, if a lending library?  How many kids attended library-sponsored activities like reading circles or quiz contests?
4. Focus group with local community members.  Your neutral visitor might also sit down and talk with a medium sized group- maybe the schoolteachers, maybe community leaders, maybe a women's group.  Given enough time and some credibility (by having a local guide as companion), the discussion that ensues will tell a lot about the library functioning.  Does someone actually have a story about a kid who studies a lot in the library and then passed an exam?  If so, you are good to go!
   
5. Survey of the local community.  If you have a small budget and some local university-level manpower, then you can think of doing a user-satisfaction survey.  With help from schoolteachers, you can have kids in 4th grade and up fill out questionnaires.  What were the last three books they read?  Do they use the library? Do they know the name of the librarian?  Can they articulate how the library has helped them?
6. Comparative survey.  Compare reading patterns etc. between kids in the village with the library to kids in "matching" villages without libraries.  This is the first cut attempt to see differences, but of course is fraught with what social scientists call selection bias- maybe you located the library in a community where kids were already reading well; or the opposite, you located the library in the most disadvantaged community.  In either case, the straight comparison will be biased by the pre-existing conditions that are hard to capture and control for.  Same goes for a pre-library and post-library survey or results of reading test.  Lots of things change in a village over time- a new school director, different teachers, etc. might confound the effects of the library on reading.
7. Randomized experimental impact assessment.  If you have a million dollars, then you can establish 50 libraries in a randomly selected group of villages, and not establish villages in another 50 control villages, and then compare the differences after ten years.  Yeah right.
8. Randomly assess reading programs.  This is more feasible, since you can allocate different kids to different reading programs sponsored by the library, and see which programs are cost-effective.  One important caveat- anyone can improve reading with one on one tutoring for six months... so the reading program should be designed to be realistic in terms of costs, and not rely on presence of expensive managers or consultants.  And the costs have to be measured.  A program that costs $100 per kid may produce a 10% improvement in scores, and another program than costs $10 per kid produces a 2% increase in scores.... which is to be recommended?
   

On January 26-27 UgCLA conducted its fifth workshop for all of it member libraries. For the first time the workshop was hosted by one of the members: Kabubbu Community Library, which, thanks to generous support from the UK, is not only unusually well built and well stocked but is associated with a village conference centre with facilities for meetings and accommodation for guests. It's a great place and considerably cheaper than a hotel. We were joined for the workshop by two friends from abroad: Sarah Switzer, who is working for Under the Reading Tree in Tanzania, and Katie Uher, who represents Ready for Reading in Rwanda. They are doing great work in their respective countries, and they were a great help at our workshop too.

The workshop was funded by a grant promised by Pockets of Change (POC), a small donor organization in New York. POC has offered to fund the purchase of ten sets of children's books (valued at $200 each) to be distributed to libraries on the basis of proposals that they will be writing over the next month; then in August it will fund another workshop at which the recipient libraries will report on their experiences with the books. So the theme of the workshop was "Working with Children," and we prepared for it by purchasing the initial $200 set - actually, we found that after spending slightly less than that we had accumulated a representative, if not comprehensive, collection of the children's books available in Uganda. The exercise made us aware of two salient issues: most of the books are highly didactic, and there are very few picture books available (we are also aware that there are nowhere near enough books in local languages, but for this purpose we were focusing on English books since we don't know in which parts of the country the recipient libraries will be).
Altogether, we got about 100 volumes, including a range of traditional and modern story books as well as books with advice and information on health and social issues. The first session was spent in a World Café format, with the participants moving from one set of books to another and discussing them. Then we had two sessions on reading aloud with younger and with older children (our hosts at Kabubbu imported some children for the purpose), and the last session that day focused on displaying books for children to read by themselves and on setting up programs to encourage them to do so.

Next day there were presentations from four different member libraries about projects they had carried out to involve adults in reading with children, and the final session was about developing a proposal for using the books, to be presented to POC. The proposals must be written by Feb. 28. POC will help us to select the winners, and then we'll have a further meeting with the managers of these libraries to give them the books and to make sure that appropriate systems of evaluation and reporting are in place.

The workshop was better attended than ever, with more than forty libraries represented, and, as has become usual by now, everyone participated enthusiastically. Some of the members were new, for UgCLA has been joined by more than ten new libraries recently (bringing our total membership to 55), but the new people fit in well and some were especially active. Everyone stayed for the Annual General Meeting, which was the last event of the day, and there were not even any complaints when we announced a rise in our annual subscription from 20,000 to 30,000 Uganda shillings (from about $10 to $15). Somehow or other we seem to have hit on a winning formula here in Uganda, and we look forward to seeing the proposals for the Children's Book Project.

Kate Parry
Chair, UgCLA
Executive Director for East Africa, FAVL
4 February 2010

Peace Corp volunteer Emilie Crofton's has posted a nice video of the Pobe Mengao Library on her blog.

Uganda Community Libraries Association workshop, Jan. 28, 2010. Summarizing the previous day's work. The facilitator is Christine Sempebwa, Director of Ka Tutandike, and Vice-Chair
of UgCLA.

Lucas Amikiya, FAVL/CESRUD coordinator in Ghana, visited Jordan Nu community library, a FAVL affiliated library, which has been generously supported over the years by Marilyn Deer.  During his stay, teachers from the primary school came to the library for a library classes. The librarian helped them understand the rules of the library, and helped one of the students to read a storybook.

"Libraries are critical information providers and part of their function is to make information policies. The policies that they adopt on the selection, organization and dissemination of the information they possess determine, in large part, their effectiveness... Sierra Leone's attempt at attaining socio-economic objectives in her post-war period is basically an information proposition. Her successful participation in inter national trade negotiations, finance, good governance, gender and human rights activities, to cite but a few examples, which involve national interest, depends significantly on her information power. This is why the issue of policies on library and information management should be viewed with utmost seriousness and pursued with zest and diligence."

John Kargbo and Anne-Reed at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, November 2009

I was having a conversation with my friend's father, who is a professor and researcher in the neuro-bio field, regarding my current trip to Sierra Leone and work with Friends of African Village Libraries. I attempted to explain the organization and my project as vaguely as you might explain something in a friendly passing conversation over cheese and crackers with the parents of your friend.  I was surprised to not quite get the normal response.  This individual began to argue and pose questions such as, "Why libraries?" "Why books... why not computers?" "Why not export something like a Kindle and have all books downloaded?" "Books are dying in the information world, why establish an ancient institution, when you could focus solely on new technology?"

I wasn't quite prepared to have a full blown argument about the importance of books in fostering a culture of reading and when I attempted to list the possible/obvious downfalls of bringing Kindle's instead of books to a rural library, I started receiving responses such as "Well, if there is no electricity, why aren't you getting electricity to these places instead? Building roads? Minimizing corruption?" Essentially, instead of using my current "expertise" and intense interest in the importance and effectiveness of community libraries, I should just try to save the world entirely? Now, how effective is that?  A bit flustered at the full on attack of what little I am trying to contribute using what experience I have, I couldn't help but mull on his comments regarding the effectiveness of populating a library with books.
 
If you wanted to read something, would you open up your computer and browse through PDFs on your hard drive or would you rather browse through pages you could actually flip through with your hands?  I know that I would much rather engage with what I am reading.  Even more useful in this argument, what if you were a child, just learning how to read, would you rather pick up a colorful book with a vibrant cover, or browse through files on a Kindle that appears to be much like a toy since you haven't really learned how to read yet.  I think of the primary school students I met in the Mapaki Community Library in Sierra Leone, flipping through pages, pointing to pictures and words and showing, their friends what they saw on the page, tossing one book in a pile only to dive into another.  Can that be done on an electronic screen? Perhaps, but is that really the way to engage a child to become curious about wanting to understand the words in a children's book?  I think not.
  
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