LIBE 477- Inquiry Blog Post#4

 Developing Libraries

 

When I read the topic for this week’s blog post, my first thought went to a book called “My Librarian Is a Camel: How Books Are Brought to Children Around the World” by Margriet Ruurs. 

 

In this book, Ruurs examines how 13 different countries utilize mobile libraries to bring books to children in remote areas. While many of the countries in the book were developing nations, I was surprised to see Canada in there as well. Nunavut is featured as having a Borrower-by-Mail program where books are mailed to children instead of being delivered in person. I was intrigued by this program, but I decided to focus on the programs that exist in Mongolia for my research.

 

 

Mongolia is a country with a population of 3.278 million people and there are approximately 1,500 libraries to serve them. Most of these libraries are located in the most populated northern cities of the country and are not accessible to people in rural areas.

The main push for mobile libraries in Mongolia came from a man named Dashdondog Jamba. 

 

 

He is an author of children’s books in Mongolia, and he began by delivering books by camel and horse-drawn wagon, before upgrading to a van to travel in. He saw the need for literature in his country and he wanted to reach the children of nomadic herders, who did not stay in one place long enough to attend traditional school. “Over the last 20 years, his library has traveled 50,000 miles through every province of Mongolia—mostly before the van was part of the operation.” (Jacques, 2014)

Jamba paid for the publication of many of the books out of his own pocket and “due to the fact that there were limited copies of books, he would spend several days in one location so that the short books could be read by many children before he moved on to the next location.” (Bookbird, 2010) 

Jamba brought happiness and books to many children across Mongolia, and he has dedicated his life to raising the literacy rate in his country.

 

Books for Asia is an organization that has been distributing hard copies of books to school children in Mongolia for many years. In 2010 this video was released to promote and fundraise for the program. 

 

In 2016, Books for Asia began a new project called Let’s Read! Mongolia, in which they use "high-impact, low-cost technology to give children access to age-appropriate books in Mongolian and English.“ (Asia Foundation, 2016) The organization donated e-books to 2,500 students in grades 5-9. The e-books were loaded with over 200 texts in both Mongolian and English for the students to read.

 

 

An Australian company called Library for All developed the Android platform that is used on these e-books. I thought that it was so positive to see all these organizations from different countries working together to bring books to children that would not otherwise have access to them. 

 

While the delivery of physical books doesn’t give as much of a variety of materials as the e-book program, the combination of these 2 initiatives help to ensure that children in Mongolia have some access to books, and hopefully the e-book program can be expanded to include more students in the future. Doing so would allow new material to be added to the students’ devices and they can stay more up to date in their content.

 

So many countries benefit from the use of mobile libraries around the world. As stated in Libraries on the Move, “In developing nations, school libraries with insufficient and irrelevant resources, insufficient and/or untrained staff, and inadequate facilities are more common than not, making it incredibly difficult to raise literacy rates and improve academic achievement.” (Moore, pg.6)

Hopefully bringing more reading options to students can help to promote a love of reading and encourage people around the world to continue their education.

 

 

 

School Devices

 

The second piece of our reading this week asked about the variety of devices being used in school. When I created my library’s website, I made sure to test it out on a laptop, and iPad, and an iPhone. The site worked on all of those, but I honestly never thought to have someone try it out on an android device or a different brand of tablet. After this week’s topic I asked a few teachers to try them out and lucky it was fine. It is definitely a good thing to keep in mind for future media projects though!

 

It had also never occurred to me that not all devices would be able to connect to our Wifi at school until I tried to use an Amazon Fire tablet in our library. They are much more affordable than iPads and I had hoped to create a ‘listen to reading’ station using QR codes for the students to use during their library time. Unfortunately, I was told that our district Wifi doesn’t support Fire tablets and I wouldn’t be able to connect them. We have iPads and Windows based laptops that are used in by students and staff in our building and we are not a BYOD school. I didn’t even know that it was possible for certain devices to be filtered out of Wifi accessibility. I’m not sure that I have much say over our district’s Wifi policy, so my current thought is to send out a message to our families asking for old unused iPhones that I can use to create my listening centre. It is something that may become an issue in the future though, as students’ personal devices become more and more prevalent in school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resources

Home. Library For All. (2022, March 4). Retrieved March 2022, from https://libraryforall.org/ 

Ruurs, M. (2005). My librarian is a camel: How books are brought to children around the world. Boyds Mills Press. 

Jacques, J. (n.d.). The Camelback Library. theTrumpet.com. Retrieved March 2022, from https://www.thetrumpet.com/12152-the-camelback-library 

Johns Hopkins University Press. (2010, March 25). Dashdondog Jamba: Mongolia author. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature. Retrieved March 2022, from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/376607 

Moore, J., Elkins, A., & Boelens, H. (2017). Libraries on the move: By land, by sea, and by Air. IASL Annual Conference Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.29173/iasl7167 

The let's read! asia Digital Library expands to Mongolia. The Asia Foundation. (2016, April 3). Retrieved March 2022, from https://asiafoundation.org/2016/02/01/the-lets-read-asia-digital-library-expands-to-mongolia/