A report from the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council library task force:
June 2010
As students in the Mandarin immersion program reach higher grades, finding them books to read and videos to watch becomes more of an issue.
The MIPC held a meeting towards the end of school this year with Carla Kozak, Children and Youth Services Collection Development Specialist at the San Francisco Public Library, to talk about the needs of our students and how we can work with the library to help families find books and materials.
Topics they addressed included:
– Creating lists of age appropriate books with titles in pinyin so non-Chinese speaking parents can more easily reserve them online
– Buying more simplified as opposed to traditional character books
– Educating library staff about the growing numbers of SFUSD students learning simplified characters. Several parents have reported library staff being dismissive of and even hostile towards finding books in simplified characters.
Thanks to Helen Tong, the 4th grade Mandarin teacher at Starr King, and parents Stacey Leyton and Lisa Want, for arranging and attending the meeting.
Notes from their meeting are below:
Acquisition of library materials
The SFPL has definitely gotten the message that they need to order more books with simplified characters and more multimedia items in Mandarin, although they still have strong needs in Cantonese/traditional characters as well, so they have to figure out a way to meet both sets of needs.
The SFPL works with a variety of different vendors, including local and overseas vendors, to purchase Chinese language books. They used to have more freedom to buy books off the shelf but that is not the case anymore, and they have to follow City rules for working with contractors.
The budget for ordering Chinese language materials is being cut, as are all other City budgets, but is still relatively large. They just recently ordered the Rainbow Fairy books in English and Chinese but she was not sure whether this was in simplified or traditional characters. One problem she mentioned is that many of the Chinese/English books that come with CD’s have English CD’s, because the materials are designed for Chinese speakers learning English as opposed to the opposite.
Most importantly, they are HAPPY to get suggestions about specific books and multimedia materials that would meet our kids’ needs. There is a way to suggest specific titles online. But Ms. Tong offered that she could work with other teachers to develop a list of suggested materials appropriate for kids enrolled in Mandarin immersion. Carla said that it’s important to prioritize — a list of 100 books is better than a list of 1,000 And as much information as possible is really helpful: title, publication date, suggested vendor, etc.
Carla also suggested that Ms. Tong attend the annual meeting the SFPL has with East-West Books, when East-West Books highlights new materials.
One caveat is that they have exhausted their budget for this year and so won’t really start ordering new materials until July 2010. And as you might imagine, for Chinese materials in particular, it takes some time for the books to arrive and then be processed before they make it to the shelves.
Cataloguing
Cataloguing is a different department. We should be able to tell approximate age level by the labels – jPS is for preschool to grade 2, jR is for beginning readers, jF is fiction, j and then a Dewey number is nonfiction. They don’t currently have a way of distinguishing between simplified and traditional characters in the labeling. Carla is going to follow up on whether it would be possible to use a system like colored dots to make this easier for parents.
Carla said it is not possible to have the titles of the books translated into English and put on the books’ spine to make it easier for non-Chinese-speaking parents to identify appropriate materials. For example, the Chinatown library has used a system of green dots to identify bilingual books.
Location of materials
For AV materials, the library is going to start “floating collections.” That means that the materials will first be placed where there are identified gaps. Then they will stay wherever they are returned. So if you order something from the Chinatown library but then return it to the Glen Park library, it will stay at Glen Park.
The librarian at Potrero Hill has already expressed a need for more Chinese language materials so they are trying to meet that need.
Contact information
Carla’s contact information is below.
Carla Kozak
Children and Youth Services Collection Development Specialist
San Francisco Public Library
190 – 9th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-557-4271
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 
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