New Collection: World Language Fiction

A few weeks ago we were approached by a new student who was looking for a leisure read.  Immediately excited by this rare opportunity to suggest new fiction titles to a high school student, we began pointing out new books and trying to get a sense of what the student liked to read.  This is when it got tricky as the student began to explain that he was looking for a leisure read, but one that was written in French!

Inspired by this student's quest for improving his foreign language proficiency, we decided to reconsider our current World Language Collection, which was housed in the nonfiction section and decided to move selected fiction to a new "World Language Fiction" collection.  We created a new display for the books in the fiction section of the library, a display more likely to be noticed by the foot traffic in the library.  In addition to the new display, we purchased some new French novels, such as Harry Potter and a crime thriller by Fred Vargas and highlighted titles we current owned, like Stephan King's Dolores written in German, and Howl's Moving Castle written in Japanese. 

The response to our newly branded collection has been immediate and within an hour of shelving the books in their new location, we had a student hungrily pick up Harry Potter in Spanish and begin browsing through the text to see what she could understand.  We look forward to adding to this collection and invite students and faculty alike to email us with any titles they would like us to purchase for the library!