1. Meaghan O’Connor Program Officer, IREX Saturday, April 2, 2011
Sister Libraries
Meaghan O’Connor
Program Officer, IREX
Saturday, April 2, 2011

2. “Becoming a sister library is an opportunity to build relationships with libraries in other cultures that can help us learn, understand, and better serve our own community.”
-Sarah Ann Long ALA President

3. Why Sister Libraries? Community focus Staff focus
Increase cultural awareness
Create connections across the globe
Explore the heritage of community members
Staff focus
Broaden views of the library profession
Share information, resources, expertise, and training
Share techniques and technologies to help solve problems

4. Sample Projects

5. Academic Libraries
Tecnológico de Monterrey (Monterrey, Mexico) & University of Maryland (College Park, MD) planned a joint conference that took place in Monterrey, October 2008

6. Public Libraries
Des Plaines Public Library (Des Plaines, IL) and Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin (Guadalajara, Mexico) have exchanged staff, gifted books to each other, and have coordinated children’s programming.

7. Special Libraries
California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA) is supporting the foundation of the library at the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center (Kigali, Rwanda).

8. Considerations $$ Funding $$ Language Library needs & resources
Institutional support
How formal should the partnership be?
Community support
Flexibility

9. Sister Libraries Wiki

20. Other routes to partnership
Sister Cities
US Embassy / American Corners
Demographic information

22. What’s that URL again? http://wikis.ala.org/sisterlibraries