Project 2: Proposal to Create Reference Library

            I would like to propose a new library in the city of Long Beach, CA. It will be open to all but focus aimed towards schoolchildren pre-k to grade 12^th but with strong focus on elementary levels and high school levels. This library will have strong focus on academics as well as college prep help and tutoring. I feel the library’s that are offered to schoolchildren especially that are housed in their schools are very lacking now. Thus, causing many student to be unprepared when they enter the college life and have to do more reports and research papers leaving them vulnerable to the world of “googling” everything thing they are asked to search. From what I have witnessed, the public libraries are trying to make their libraries more open and helpful to students but it is just not as focused as I would like it. Therefore, I would like to have the opportunity to propose a library that is based for students so they can have more books on their level available for them and more tutoring resources as well as opportunities to learn better researching and referencing skills. Also, if we can provide college assistance and cater to helping students understand more about higher education and the benefits. With this proposal, I am hoping to construct a whole library that can be the hotspot where students seeking higher information of libraries can come converge and gain a better insight. I have not come up with a name as this can be brought up at a different time. I feel this best be placed under academic library status.

            In the city of Long Beach, CA the population breakdown is roughly 130,320 youth between ages of five and under to 19year, which is 28.5% of the population. The total Long Beach population is 462,257 people ranging from youth to adults aged 19 to 40. The Population breakdown by age is 13.6% children from 5 and under to 9years old, 6.9% will be the young adults or “tweens” aged 10 to 14 years old and last but not least would be teenagers 15 to 19 years old taking up 7.7% of the population. I feel the youth/children would benefit most from children educational based learning materials such as mathematic workbooks and we can also provide help for their parents on children education betterment as well as children health, nutrition and safety. Then for the older groups like the 10 to 14 age group (31,715) we can provide young adult novels for them as well as college based materials just to get them focused and thinking of that ahead of time. We can also get them started on referencing and researching by having sessions or after school tutoring/classes where a librarian can show them how fun it is to research or bring some kind of excitement to learning more about the library and learning that the librarian is their friend not someone to avoid. I feel the teenagers would benefit most from this new library because of the focus on college higher education as well as gaining more knowledge on how to work with the large reference materials offered through my library. This will in turn help them a lot when they have to do a lot of research papers and the tutoring will help them on site if they are struggling with what or how to do a certain thing for their projects/assignments. But we will not count out adults, which take up 31.6% from ages 20 to 40 who are in need of these resources for college based assignments as well as work related or many other assorted reasons they will need the services. Long beach is a very diverse community so our library will cater to all the languages most popular and do its best to make everyone welcome but since majority of our patrons will be student aged they will speak English first and foremost but we would also like to cater to their parents who may speak another langue first nature. So the different ethnicities consists of all the age groups but Caucasians are 213,066 making up a larger portion of the ethnic population at 46.1%, after that comes Hispanics at 40.8% around 188,412 of the population, followed by African Americans/Black at 62,603 residents at 13.5%. Finally yet importantly would be Asian American and other races at 20%. We will try to make this library as diverse as the city of Long Beach is and welcoming to all races and ethnicities. So that means including literature and materials in all the preferred most spoken languages throughout long beach which would be English, Spanish, Korean, Talog, Vietnamese and Japanese.

            I feel we would be most comparable to the Long Beach Public Library Mark Twain.  Since they tend to offer a lot of community based help such as tutoring and bilingual computer classes for free since the area is lower income. We would be a larger library since Mark Twain is more condensed even after they rebuilt the library it still feels a little small for what they would like to do and our branch of the website will offer more self help for those not able to make it to the library on a regular bases. Also they are a little low on librarians from my experience the few times I would make my way to this library due to location they would be on break or helping and assisting others but there was a long line just for one librarian and its always one standard librarian who seems overworked but still very helpful. But at our library we will have at least 4 or so librarians on call so there will never be more than one person waiting for help. In my opinion I feel when you make someone’s library visit fast but helpful and very insightful (especially when it comes to young people) they will be more inclined to come back again and again and gain a new found love for visiting the library that we had when growing up. 

            As stated above we envision this library to be geared more towards the high school elementary field and we will have a very open library. We will have a surplus of young adult novels and materials because the Main Branch has the right idea but they always seem to be out of what one is looking for so at our library we will always have multiples in stock and available for young adult patrons. Also we want our librarians to come off as approachable, caring, parental figures hoping for the best for everyone and open for helping and assisting. it will have a family learning atmosphere because I feel that provides for better learning and creativity for everyone around. We will also be providing a lot homework help and referencing service workshops to help with proper researching as well.

            Since we have mostly student patrons will be students we will try to have the most up to date general encyclopedias and dictionaries. But we will have both hard copies and electronic of them available since most of our patrons will be of the technological age. Our reference collections will contain hard copy and electronic materials to please patrons of all backgrounds and ages.  For our ready references we will make sure to have the most up to date almanacs, handbooks and manuals as well as having the largest specific subject encyclopedias for government, sciences, technology, sports reference, education especially since these library is geared toward students.  Our library will also have large electronic database collection of geographical, government and biographical sources/documents that will go towards their researching, homework look up, and assisting with anything else, they would need for their class work. Finally yet importantly, what would make our reference collection stand out more than other libraries would be to have more hands on reference sources especially for the younger groups. Therefore, we will have world maps and globes to assist in geography knowledge, musical instruments and sheet music to provide more interest in the arts and our library will be more of a kinesthetic environment where youth and young adults can come and experience things that can get their creative ideas flowing. To know the library can actually be the start of everything good as well as a great place to learn and be free to ask for help in bettering their understanding of the inner workings.

WORKS CITED

LBPL Website - Homepage." LBPL Website". n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2012.
http://www.lbpl.org/default.asp.
Profile of General Population Characteristics: 2010 2010 Demographic Profile Data." American FactFinder. U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census., n.d. Web. 29 Mar. 2012.http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_DP_DPDP1&prodType=table.