Volunteering in the library
Start date: May 4, 2015,
End date: Sep 3, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
Project Volunteering in the library took place in the North Bohemian Research Library in Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic. Motivation for realization of this project was on the one hand an effort to bring something new to our daily routine and widen services for the public and on the other hand it was the possibility to help young volunteers to develop some of their skills and knowledge and to get practice in field, which is completely new for them.
Project followed our previous EVS projects realized in the library and was focused to strengthening of culture differences, communication, creativity and partially also to digital competences. Project activities were focused to intercultural dialogue, cultural awareness and to comprehension of importance of mutual understanding and necessity of tolerance. What was new in the project was the participation of two volunteers in the same time - one was from Spain and second from Armenia - and also the fact, that one of the partners is not a member of European Union.
The project included two main lines. The first one was focused for presentations about Armenia for public and for a work with social media. Armenian volunteer Shushanik presented her country and its culture in 5 presentations and regurarly write articles for librarian blog and learnt how it works if you have blog on blogger. She developed not only her creativity, but also her computer and information literacy and her communication and presentation skills. The second line, in which Spanish volunteer Elvira was involved, was connected with cooperation with Children’s Library - primarily she cooperated on activities for children and families. She proved her creativity and that is able to work in a team, she strengthened her communication skills, continue with development of her creativity and she had the possibility to realize some of her own ideas. Elvira had also the possibility to present her home country and its culture to people in Usti - she made 2 presentations - so she strengthened her computer skills and digital competences too..
Both volunteers had the possibility to improve their pedagogical skills and communication during lessons of Spanish (Elvira) and Russian (Shushanik) for librarians. They participated in common librarian activities (e.g. lending and returning books and sorting them to shelves, contact with readers, work with catalogue and librarian system and some databases), in some activities for public and together with Czech volunteers organized meetings of English Club.
Besides that they made an exhibition about EVS which reflected their own pieces of knowledge and experience from their project, they visited 3 schools to talks with students about their home countries and about EVS projects and together with project coordinator made an succesfull talk about EVS for schools in the library. On this talk we cooperated also with AFS intercultural programmes - they presented the possibility of studies on secondary school in foreign country to students and also the possibility, that their schools can host foreign students for a year.
The goal of the project is to increase the creativity during some of the common librarian activities including activities for public, improvement of communication with foreigners and development of tolerance and understanding. We expect that project will also lead to widen the portfolio of activities for library's users and local community and in its consequences also to widen the net of people who are actively interested in issues and events connected with the library.
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