We'd love to hear you feedback and questions about our Multilingual Library Project!
Lakeshore Technical College Library, like many Wisconsin libraries, has traditionally been a monolingual space, operating exclusively in English. However, we recognize that our students, staff, and community members represent an increasingly diverse range of linguistic identities. Now, thanks to the WiLS Ideas to Action Fund, we are able to address this gap by creating a multilingual learning environment that celebrates linguistic diversity and provides services, programming, and resources to our patrons in their first or heritage languages.
After gathering input from stakeholders across campus, our “Multilingual Library” initiative was set into motion in October 2022 with a three-pronged approach that specifically focused on expanding offerings in two of the most common languages spoken by our students: Spanish and Hmong.
This guide is a place to share our strategies, successes, and resources with the greater library community of practice. Please use the navigation menu on the left to see how we approached each of these three goals. Language is an ever-evolving entity, so it follows that this work will never truly be done. We express our sincerely gratitude to WiLS Ideas to Action for helping us launch this initiative!
Please reach out to us if you have any questions regarding your own multilingual initiatives - we would love to hear how your projects are progressing and assist in any way we can!