#1: Label your non-English materials in their own language →

From Emma:

I implemented this tip at the downtown branch of the Capital Area District Library in the Lansing, Michigan area. The existing setup was acrylic label holders for each collection with a "world languages" graphic on the left and the name of the language, in English, on the right.

Since I was new and cautious, I checked my translations in two different dictionaries for each language. The only case where I came across anything at all complicated was Somali, which appeared Romanized as af Soomaali but also in Arabic as اَف صَومالي . I wasn't initially sure what was more appropriate, so I settled it by opening several of the books in the collection. All of them used the Roman alphabet, so that was what I went with.

More than anything, this turned out to be an arts and crafts challenge. Normally for shelf labels I would use a label maker, but the label maker I had couldn't handle any non-Roman characters, so I had to resort to printing out a Word document with the labels and cutting them out, which I am not good at. If I could go back in time and do it again, I would use Excel and turn on light grid lines to act as cutting guidelines.

The other problem was that the new labels, which included both the native language name of the language and the English name (the latter for the convenience of English-speaking shelvers) were longer than the old ones and wouldn't fit in the existing acrylic label holders. I looked into ordering new ones, but they turn out to be very expensive (about eight dollars per holder, in the quantity we wanted), so I had to just tape the paper labels to the shelves. Those are going to require more maintenance, so I saved the label template somewhere prominent but logical in our shared file system so that it should be easy to find and reprint any labels that get damaged.

Overall, though, this was mostly an easy tip to implement. It required no new materials and it took about an hour to locate the terms, print them out, and cut out and replace the new labels. I did notice that the non-English collections were organized alphabetically by their English name (Arabic, Chinese, French, Somali, etc.), which seems really arbitrary for most users, but I couldn't think of a better alternative for now.