Taking Your MLIS Abroad by Lara Seven Phillips

Author:Lara Seven Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Students lacked basic experience in a library, including behavior expectations and library processes. Libraries are not common in government schools and there are few public ones.

Michelle Marx, Library Coordinator, school library, Istanbul, Turkey, 2014–2016

The United Arab Emirates has a similar situation, as they are also a culture with a rich oral history tradition. In order to keep pace with other nations, the United Arab Emirates has been updating their K-12 teaching standards to include less rote memorization and more critical thinking exercises, but as the broader culture has not yet developed a habit of reading for pleasure or research, it is an ongoing task. Government schools do have libraries, but they are staffed by people with little training in libraries, as the region does not have many library programs and no equivalent to American Library Association (ALA) accreditation. 2016 has been declared the “Year of Reading,” as the government works to encourage Emiratis to read more often.1

Like durable goods such as electronics, books are more expensive in the United Arab Emirates than in the United States. Even though they are pricier, books are well within the budget of most, if not all, Emiratis. There are a few public libraries in the United Arab Emirates, but all have opened within the last 20 years or so and are located in larger cities such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai. People in more rural areas would not have easy access to any library other than their school library, with some students reporting that the school librarian does not let students check out books for fear of damage and loss.

It was always fun explaining open stacks to Italians who had only experienced paging books. I was also surprised that it was considered acceptable to write (in pencil) in our library books and we frequently had to provide erasers (and sometimes the threat of their needing to replace the book) and insist that it was not appropriate to write in the books.

Holly Grossetta Nardini, Public Services Librarian, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy, 1997–2000

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