Non-English language texts - What do you do?

[Candace Taylor-Weber]

Hi all,

I am curious to know what you are doing with non-English language texts in your library. International schools tend to have a large collection.

Do you integrate your non-English texts into the Dewey numbers? Do you have specific spaces on the shelves for those languages? If you have spaces for certain languages, do you then sort within that space? What has been most effective for your users?

[Michelle Rinker]

Hi Candace-

I just started building our foreign language collection in the past year. I am focusing on the languages taught at our school (French, Spanish and Mandarin) but am acquiring a few others as well (mainly Korean and Japanese for the large parent population we have at our school).

I'm finding that Follett Titlewave is an excellent resource for this- they are careful to indicate simplified or traditional Chinese and I'm able to find a lot of great well-known books in other languages. I find this is a greater attraction for students (we have the Wimpy kid series in Chinese and Splat the Cat etc.).

I have separated out my FL collection in an area that is welcoming to parents and so they are not in the 400's section in the stacks but rather near the magazine display.

 

Having said all of that, I'm not ready to spend too much of my budget on these resources but will slowly build the collection over time.

Thanks for starting the discussion-

Michelle

International School Yangon

[Juliet Evans]

I work at an American school in Mexico, so about 30% of our collection is Spanish (70% English). The Spanish fiction we shelf separately, non-fiction together with the English.

In the last few years I've started buying other languages (French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese) for our 3rd culture families, since some of our new arrivals don't yet speak English or Spanish and its nice to have something to offer these children when they come to the library. For now they're shelved with the 400s, since there's not that many.

I get some of these titles from Follett (although the Japanese ones are SO much more expensive!). And I've starting asking 3rd culture families to donate books when they leave or make a trip home.