photo: the bookmobile in mexico during the 2008 caravan to cuba.
Dear friends, colleagues, supporters of Cuban libraries:
First, we would like to thank those of you who gave generous support in helping us send the Bookmobile to Granma, for the “1868 Provincial Library” in the city of Bayamo. The bookmobile arrived in Cuba with the Pastors for Peace Caravan and was put into operation after a grand inaugural ceremony in October 2008 with invited guests, school children, librarians and community members. We visited the bookmobile in January 2009 and rode along on trips to communities surrounding Bayamo where it was heavily used.
We want to heartily thank our supporters for the monetary and in-kind (books) support you gave to the bookmobile project. All of your help made it quite successful. We told the Bayamo librarians about the dozens of librarians and supporters who contributed to the project, and they asked us to thank all of you who sent books, money, support and puppets to them. The Cuban librarians and patrons greatly value the bookmobile and are very appreciative of the efforts of everyone who helped with it and wanted to show their gratitude to every single contributor. See the photos below and at the bookmobile blog at: http://bookmobile.wordpress.com/.
Now that the bookmobile is successfully serving the countryside in the Granma Province, we would like to tell you about and invite you to be a part of our newest project. We are collaborating with librarians at the Ruben Martinez Villena Provincial Library, located in Old Havana, to help develop the collection with high-quality young adult books in Spanish (we’re calling it the Young Adult Book Project). We are concentrating on young adult titles in Spanish that have been nominated and/or awarded recognition by the American Library Association. There is a great need for such books because the young adults are avid readers and have read practically everything in the library suitable for their age/reading level. Libraries in Cuba are heavily used and literacy in Cuba is nearly 100%. On a visit to the library in Old Havana, we met children’s librarian, Adrian Guerra, who told us of the very active teen readers he serves and the need for more young adult reading materials in the library.
We loved the idea of helping teen readers as soon as we heard of the need! Of course, we told Adrian, we would love to help build the library’s young adult collection! Adrian also shared that any new reading material would be used by groups of teenage readers for their “Wiki” Reading Club where the readers review and recommend titles for their peers. We are especially excited to gather these titles for the reading youth in Old Havana, Cuba and we urge you to join our efforts with your donations, both monetary and book titles. The actual cash donations are tax-deductible if sent through “IFCO: BOOKMOBILE PROJECT” (the address is below).
The books that we have purchased already are library discards; we are perfectly happy with ex-library copies and discarded/withdrawn books in Spanish suitable for young adults. We will gladly take them. Most of the collection thus far — including the titles we’ve purchased on aLibris — are former library copies. Special thanks to Librarians Beth Sibley and Tarnell Abbott for their very generous donations of fabulous withdrawn and discarded library materials in Spanish!
Here’s what we’ve already done. We requested and were awarded a small grant from the Christopher Reynolds Foundation (which also supported the Bookmobile to Granma with a book grant). We decided to select the books that are award-winners and nominees of the Young Adult Services Association (YALSA) of the American Library Association and other library groups which are available in Spanish. YALSA nominates titles for several annual best books awards (http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/booklistsawards/booklistsbook.cfm). We have purchased or had donated about 60 titles already. If you’d like to join in our efforts, our wishlist is at www.aLibris.com. The YA Book Project blog, http://www,yaproject.wordpress.com has a complete list of titles we recommend for this collection. Neither Alibris, nor Amazon nor any of the other used book venders carry all of the desired books, so if you run across any of the titles being sold for a few cents, please grab them.
1. If you can help us using aLibris, please do this: Once you are at www.aLibris.com, click on “wishlist” at the top of the page. Then, to search for our specific wishlist, type in dana_lubow@yahoo.com and you will be connected to the wishlist for the “Young Adult Books for the Ruben M. Villena Library.”
2. If you are in a community that serves Spanish-language readers, we appeal to you to obtain your public library and/or school library’s discarded young adult titles and send them to us for this project. All new and used young adult books in Spanish, fiction and non-fiction, are fine for this project.
3. Monetary donations for us to select and purchase the titles. Please send the contribution to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO)
418 W 145th Street, New York, NY 10031. The check should be made out to Bookmobile Project.
Thank you,
Dana Lubow
Rhonda Neugebauer
Ben White
