 Greetings, everyone, and welcome to this colloquial presentation from the School of Information at San Jose State University. I'm Dr. Bill Fisher, the coordinator of our colloquium series, and I'm delighted today to introduce our speaker, Dr. Michael Coveyne, who's an associate professor of economics at nearby Santa Clara University. Professor Coveyne teaches courses in the economics of gender in developing countries, African economic development, and international economics at Santa Clara. And through this, he has become interested in how having good information resources that can help a country, a community, a village provide resources for their population. And in doing so, in pursuing this interest, he has founded an organization called Friends of African Village Libraries, and he's with us today to talk about the importance of these community libraries and his organization. And so let me turn things over to Michael, and let me tell you that I'm delighted to have you with us today. Thank you very much, Bill. It's a pleasure for me to be here. The idea for my presentation, brief outline, is to give people an idea of the experience that we've had at Friends of African Village Libraries. In establishing libraries, implementing reading programs, creating reading materials, I'll also talk a little bit about some of the research results from academic-oriented research that I've done on libraries. And I will also talk about how little we know, in some sense, about what kinds of impacts reading programs have. I'll then talk a bit about some similar nonprofits and introduce the notion of a nascent social movement for promoting libraries and reading, in particular, in rural Africa, and close with some discussion of challenges and the partnerships that actors in those social movements face, notably interacting with local communities, with the national government, and with larger NGOs. I see a bunch of people online want to welcome you to this colloquium. And I want to encourage you to interrupt. If you have questions that are, might be pretty short, be a little more interactive. If the question looks like it might be a little longer for me to respond to, then I'd ask you to hold off until the end. I'll probably talk for about 30, 35 minutes, and we'll have plenty of time then for discussion for some of your questions. But if you have a quick question as I'm going through the slides, please feel free to interject and I'll try and respond right then. So let me give you an idea of what FAVL is about. This is an organization founded in 2001 by myself and some others. So we're an all-volunteer organization here in the United States and we employ a number of librarians and staff in a variety of countries. We operate presently in four countries. We operate in Burkina Faso, which is covered there by the PIN Cushions. And so you can't quite see the name Burkina Faso. We have currently 13 libraries there and a plan, a grant project for expansion to 20 more libraries. We also have three libraries that we support in Northern Ghana. Over in East Africa, we support libraries in Uganda through a partnership with the Uganda Community Libraries Association and with, we support a library in Tanzania. The, I'm sorry, let me, Burkina Faso, which is the place that I'm most familiar with. I'm the director of FAVL for West Africa. Burkina Faso is a small landlocked country in West Africa with about 16 million people. And our libraries are primarily in the Southwest of the country in just north of Bubba, Jalasso, you see the large city down there in the Southwest. So that's what I'll be talking about mostly today. The economy is of Burkina and the other places that we serve is it's very poor, GDP per capita in Burkina is about $500 per person. People primarily earn their livings through agriculture. So Burkina Faso is one of the most rural countries in the world. About 70% of the population lives in villages and farming them is the main economic activity. And this is a typical cotton farmer in Burkina taking the cotton to, for sale. The other crops are sorghum, millet, corn, sesame, ground nuts is of course expensive livestock production. Most of the areas that we operate do not have electricity and so we don't have computer centers or IT centers in the libraries that we support. These communities typically are very gendered and girls are quite clearly disadvantaged in schooling and in being able to make their life choices. And these are, these are one of the kind of areas, the social areas that we try and address in our libraries to make them extremely girl-friendly and support girls in their abilities to realize their potential. We shouldn't neglect boys, of course, boys in particular in recent years in West Africa have been lured away from schooling and book learning and they're working in gold mines and this is a big issue estimated that about 200,000 or 300,000 youths in Burkina Faso now are working in small artisanal gold mines rather than being back in school. Schools, of course, aren't all that attractive in Burkina Faso. They're crowded, they're very low quality. This is a typical primary school classroom with 120 students with two teachers that serve the classroom so as you can see there's not very many resources for effective learning that go on in much of the schooling system in Burkina Faso. So our goal is to promote reading both in Burkina Faso and the other countries where we operate Uganda, Northern Ghana and Tanzania. And this is a hard goal. Village readers are typically first generation readers. Their parents are often not literate in Burkina Faso rural adult literacy rate or only about 25% and for women, for adult women this is usually lower, about 10% of adult women have completed primary school and are effective readers. So there's a very poor literacy environment in the villages. Most households do not have books. They certainly don't have children's books, picture books and the like. Government has very limited reading promotion programs. Again, to take the example of Burkina Faso, the country has about 8,000 villages in small towns and the government currently operates maybe 25 libraries in those 8,000 villages in small towns. So there's a lot of room for growth and promoting reading and the reading culture and in the region. Reading culture as all of you know of course competes with other media and currently smartphones are expanding very rapidly. People are increasingly using smartphones. They've been for the last 10 years using dumb phones that is using SMS messaging as a way to communicate but increasingly smartphones are penetrating the country and that's the kind of reading now that most people are engaged in and that's quite different from reading youth novels or young adult novels or novels intended for grownups or children's books and that's one of the deficiencies that we try to address at Friends of African Village Libraries. So as I noted we support 13 libraries in Burkina, active in Ghana and Uganda and we currently have expansion plans that we've just begun to establish 20 more libraries and I'd be happy to talk about those expansion plans after. These libraries are typically small single room affairs with about 2,000 books that paid librarian. We host a lot of reading programs at the libraries as funding permits, summer reading camps, after school reading camps, I'll talk about those in a little bit. One thing that I want to mention, it's very clear that Africa-oriented books are greatly preferred by readers and I'll talk about that in a few minutes. Just to give you an idea of what these libraries look like, these libraries are all community libraries that is we deliberately do not support or establish school libraries. Our mission is to support community libraries that are typically located in the heart of the community and that are open to all. So they're free public libraries and that's basically a choice that we made early on when we started. And the main mission of the libraries is to promote reading. People are invited, communities are invited to come and read in the libraries. Everyone is free to come to the library and grab a book and sit down and read. One thing that we have noticed in our experience is people sometimes are skeptical about whether rural villages have readers, have people interested in coming and reading. And I think we can say with confidence that that is definitely not the case. Typical village library has about from 50 to 100 visits per day and sometimes it's all with the same people who are coming quite frequently over the course of the week. But we see a lot of readers, we see a lot of very avid readers who are coming and checking out a book every two or three days and going through our collections faster than we can replenish the collections. The books are also, sorry, the books can be checked out and people are free to read outside and take the books home. If you want to take books home, you have to subscribe to the library. The subscription fee in order to check books out is very modest, is about 25 cents for school children and about 75 cents for adults, that's for a year subscription. So that very modest fee on 50 cents per person for a year enables a person to check books out. We usually get about 300 to 400 subscribers in each library over the course of the year. So that's the demand for leisure reading is clearly there in these villages in Burkina Faso. Librarians are also trained and try to promote reading culture by engaging in story time. The typical activities of librarians everywhere, especially children's librarians. This is difficult because most of the librarians are adults and they've never had story time themselves. They've never been read to when they were children. And so it takes a lot of training to overcome that initial hesitation about reading books aloud, about using funny voices to imitate the different characters in a book. Libraries are also places for leisure activities. So most of our libraries will have games like checkers or Monkala, a very typical African counting game with stones, much like backgammon. And these are very popular in the libraries. It's not uncommon to see a small group of 5 to 10 kids outside the library playing one of the games in the libraries. We also, as I noted, do reading activities like summer reading camps. And these are typically last a week to two weeks, eight hours a day. Breakfast and lunch will be included. And kids are extremely eager to participate in these camps. This is usually the only time that they get to do learning that's fun. Most of the schooling, as you saw, is in very crowded classrooms and a lot of rote learning. So the camps are extremely popular. We wish we had more funding to carry them out. But we typically are able to do one to two camps in every library each summer. We also see the libraries as places of innovation. This is a good argument for public libraries as institutions that are places where new ideas can be tested out and shared with the community. For example, one of our libraries, and now several others now, are the first places in the region that have separate latrine facilities for males and females. I mentioned the reading programs, and I just want to briefly go through the five programs that we have experimented with over the years and find pretty successful. Summer reading camps, as I mentioned, through funding from the Chenyat Sen Foundation and Ghana, our three libraries there have, over the past year, done after-school reading programs where kids come for two hours in the late afternoon after school has been let out, they go home, then they come back to the library and do a bunch of guided reading exercises. We also, in Burkina Faso, have had a program to distribute solar-powered lanterns to encourage reading at night. As I said, most houses don't have electricity, so if kids are going to read at night, they're either reading by kerosene lantern or by a candlelight. That's pretty hard on the eyes, big discouraging fact of life in rural areas that there just isn't any electricity, discourages reading. We also, and I'll talk about an evaluation of this program had, in Burkina Faso, over 2013, 2014, a youth reading program where we delivered books to about 300 youth in the surrounding villages, youth being young adults age 15 to 24, and encourage them to read. And our current project is funded by Eiffel and is a program to encourage health reading clubs for young women, again, aged in their late teens, where they come to the library every week and read health-related literature using smartphones, so the idea is to induce these young women to the library by introducing them to new technology that they've seen other people using and they know is out there, and coming to the library and using the smartphones that are in the library enables them to sort of get a jumpstart. So they learn how to use Facebook, they learn how to send messages using smartphones. That's a big draw. We have seen very good turnouts and then the main effect, of course, is that all the while that they're using this new electronic tool, they're reading material about improving their health and the health of their peers. I wanted to talk about one of our main programs at Favle, which is about eight years ago, we noticed that the readers really were preferring to read content that was relevant to their own lives, so rather than donated books coming from the United States or from France, the language of schooling in Burkina Faso is French, so there we, the libraries are basically stocked with French books and some local language books, which I'll talk about in a minute. So we started creating content for ourselves and producing printing books for ourselves. In 2007, we initiated a photo book production line, and in 2013, we initiated a multimedia center in the town of Hyundai, which is in the center of many of the libraries that we support, that produces locally authored what we might call pamphlet books. Our perspective is to make a lot of books quickly and cheaply. These are books that are intended to be read 50 to 100 times by eager readers. If you think about the cost of the book as being maybe $5, then you're getting each book read for a nickel for five cents. Pamphlet type books that are not as high quality as premium books that might be available here are going to get destroyed after 100 reads. They won't last. This is a very tough environment on books, these rural villages where people are living mostly with dirt floors and just a tough environment for books. These books then, Fast and Cheap, is our motto for creating these books. And I think we've shown quite clearly, I'll show you some examples now, of how literate, hardworking people in working in teams can easily produce books that attract readers. So let me start first with some of the photo books. Chelsea Rankle, a volunteer, spent six weeks in Burkina Faso back in 2007. She had a digital camera and we asked her to make some photo books. And one of the most popular books now in the library is this book in French. It's called the Como Feton du Dolot. In English that means how do you make Dolot, which is a brewed sorghum beverage that people in all these villages drink. And it's typically women's work. So the book is very popular amongst girls who are aspiring and will become makers of Dolot. The book is also translated into Jula, which is one of the local languages widely spoken in the area. There's very little reading of this language in the area. So we try and make every effort to promote local languages. And one way is by having these books that we produce ourselves be also translated and printed in local languages. We had another volunteer, Amy Reggio, go into a set of books oriented for girls. And one of them is a very popular title called My Favorite Book, Mon Liva Preferre, which features profiles of about 20 young women, girls from the villages, each one holding up their favorite book and explaining why that book is their favorite book. Another book that Amy did was called A Day in the Life of the Midwife. And it just is a very simple straightforward photo book about the village midwife, what she does both for her job, delivering babies and tending to new mothers, and in her ordinary, private life cooking and cleaning in her home. So it's a very nice, sweet book that lots of girls, in particular, in the village like to read. And I just want to, you know, shout out to Amy Reggio again because one of her other books was probably the most popular book in the libraries that we support, it's called My Mother and Me, and it's basically just one day in the life of a 15-year-old who goes out with her mother to conduct their ordinary farming activities. So it just follows her throughout the day. Since then, we've produced, I'll show you in a second, about 80 of these photo books, very popular also are a book about the parts of the body, this one by Elena Geralt, that is a very typical to children's books, right, just showing eyes, ears, nose, hands, and such. These books are all printed through an online print-on-demand publisher called Fast Pencil, which many of you librarians will be very familiar with. So we have our channel or our site, our marketplace on Fast Pencil. You can just search for Fast Pencil and then Friends of African Village Libraries or Faval Africa, and you can see all of the photo books that we have produced. And if you're a front speaker, this will be very attractive for you and we also have a whole bunch of English-speaking books, English-language books that we've translated to on the website. We moved in the last several years to having locally offered books, and we're very proud of our very first locally-authored book, which was called Professional Woman, I Am a Mechanic. And the illustrations are done by a local illustrator and the text by actually one of our employees at the time, Kura Donkwi, and this is just, again, a very straightforward book about a female mechanic who sets up her own business and is very successful. So it tries to be inspiring for girls to think about other occupations that they might choose rather than the very traditional ones that they're typically swatted into. Another book that we developed with collaboration between a Peace Corps volunteer and one of our staff members is about how to build, how to construct an improved latrine, a VIP latrine as they're called, much more sanitary kind of latrine in the villages. And Sanu Dunco, our employee, went out and took the photos and worked with Chrysalas and on the text. And this is the kind of book that's very appealing to adults in the library because it basically goes through in very simple French how to build one of these improved latrines and why one would build one of these improved latrines. Dunco also developed a very nice photo book of his daughter visiting the garden of the village. And again, it's very simple French, but it's the kind of French that most kids aren't exposed to. And as you know, kids learn vocabulary by absorbing it naturally by seeing words in context. So a kid may never know or be exposed to the word for watering can, which is in French, au revoir, but seeing it in context of a book, they immediately know that this is a watering can and that's how you spell watering can. And this reading is an extremely effective way to acquire vocabulary. We're also very proud of local history books. As you know, local history books are very popular everywhere in the world. And we've been developing a few of them. This one's about one of the residents of the village who participated back in the 1950s in the French colonial army. So he had a small cache of photos from the 1950s. The book starts with the photo that he took in a photo studio himself back in the 1950s, just before he headed off to join the colonial army. And the book closes with a photo of him now. He's about 80 years old and still lives in the village there. So that's a very popular book in the whole region. People know this gentleman have heard about him and now they get to read his story. So as I said, these photo books are extremely popular. We have a number of other African-authored or African-themed books. Fatou Keita is a very popular children's book writer in West Africa. And we feel like, gosh, we can compete with Fatou Keita and Kathy Noll. So I'll talk about it a little later. Has done a set of photo books that are extremely popular in Ghana and very much distributed in Ghana. Kathy was actually the inspiration for this project. We, lately as I mentioned, have moved to, with a grant from Rotary International, to doing more kinds of pamphlet style books that are authored and illustrated by people from the communities. And I'll just go quickly through some of these books. The first one in our series was called The Dream of Olivia. And it's about a young girl in the village who dreams of someday going to school. And of course, her dream comes true. These tend to be very optimistic books. Another book is Short History by Bondes Hussonovo, about a man in his village who has become a very successful agriculturalist. And the book starts by showing how he planted some orange trees and started harvesting the oranges and saved his money, expanded his orchard, and eventually had sort of a modern farm in the village. Another book that I like, Great Illustrations by Daphiel Goen-Song-Dung, is about a, just the title is called A Young Boy Who's Hardworking. And it's about how hard work can enable you to succeed in life. These are very kind of typical books that people produce as their first, as their first efforts. This is our multimedia center. It sounds grand, but really it's just a couple of computers and printers where all the books are printed and then assembled, stapled, covers are a little bit more durable on card stock. We were fortunate to have Molly Morrison, a Peace Corps volunteer, spent a year helping us set up this multimedia center and now it's operating independently. Molly also was able to organize a lot of Peace Corps volunteers to come and give those who are good illustrators to come and give workshops to the local illustrators, so here you see one of them very typical workshop that we sponsor through the Multimedia Center. I have to add parenthetically that this whole book production process was the excuse for me to publish my very first children's book, which is in English, is called Where is My Chicken? And it's a little tale wonderfully illustrated by Ezekiel Alvera, who is another volunteer who spent some months in the villages and is a great watercolorist. The book really is due to him because his watercolors were just so fantastic. I said we have to do something together and that book is available on FastPencil if you want to order it to fill another. This is the inside cover. So just to summarize this digression on creating content, we've published now more than 80 photo books. They're available on FastPencil. That's the link there that you have and we've produced now over 40 books in the Multimedia Center by local authors. So my main lesson learned is it can be done. You're a librarian. You can do this in your library using FastPencil. You can have books about your local community in FastPencil. It's very modest. All you need is a digital camera, some creativity. FastPencil is very easy. Other, you know, print-on-demand sites are great, too. The virtue of FastPencil is it's quite cheap. So their philosophy was to be a lot less expensive than many of the more expensive competitors like Blurb and Peekaboo. So I don't want to recommend any particular site. They're all great. And at low production numbers, if you're just printing 10 copies, the total budget you'd need for this is just $200 to produce a set of photo books about your own community. Let me talk now a bit about some research projects. I'll talk for about 10 more minutes and then take some questions from people in the audience. I love getting your chat tweets. Thank you very much, Maley, for that. I published a number of articles and books and I'll give you a link at the end where you can explore for further reading some of these books on rural community libraries and articles on specific reading programs. One of the things that initially I did very early on was publish a couple of articles. Just trying to measure, well, what was the impact of having Village Libraries? How much did it increase reading? And we compared then villages that had government libraries. These are called the clock or BCLPs with villages without the clock or BCLPs. And then we compared our own Village Libraries in the region of Hyundai that I mentioned earlier to villages that are comparable villages. And comparable here means having a secondary school. So it was the closest village that had a secondary school to the villages that we had located libraries in. And if you focus especially on the Hyundai region comparison, we asked three questions about reading habits. And it's hard to measure reading habits. So we're not going to pretend that these are extremely accurate. But the pattern that emerges is pretty consistent. So we asked three questions. How many books did you read in a year? How many books did you read in the previous 30 days? And then we gave them a list of 25 well-known books. And these are from secondary school students. So they're teenagers who were in basically the equivalent of 10th grade. We asked them from this list of well-known authors how many they had read. So if you compare the Villages Without Libraries, you can see for example from the list of 25 books read that the average for the places without libraries was 7.18. The average number for Villages With Libraries was 12.67. These are pretty large sample, so statistically significant differences. For books read in the previous 30 days, we go from 1.65 to 2.18. And for books read in the year, we go from 5.64 to 8.77. These are pretty substantial. They may not seem like much, but if you think of it in percentage terms, these are quite substantial increases. So the books read from the list of 25 books, that's about an 80% increase to go from 7 to 12 to go from 5 to 8, again, is about a 50% increase. So these are pretty substantial percentage increases in the number of books read. So even if they aren't very accurate, kids of course have an incentive to sort of overestimate how much they're reading. They still show quite substantial effects from having libraries in the community. We recently did another survey for our Youth and Tweed Reading Project where we surveyed about 700 students. Some of them were 700 youth. 400 of them were in communities without libraries, and 300 of them were in communities with libraries. So we asked similar questions, one in particular, how many titles can you write down of books that you have recently read? So in the Villages Without Libraries, the average number of titles was 0.26, less than one title, and Villages Without Libraries, the average wasn't real high, it's 0.50, so it's not super high, but it's a double that of the Villages Without Libraries. So that's a 100% increase in reading from the presence of Villas Libraries. So Villas Libraries definitely do have big effects on how much reading happens amongst at least this intended audience of secondary school students. I want to talk a little bit about a reading program that we implemented in rural Burkina Faso. I was interested in the effects on economic preferences of reading fiction. So as all of you know from the work of Stephen Crashing and others, reading has huge effects on reading. Reading a lot makes you a better reader, but a lot of people throughout the last several decades have also thought that reading does more than that. It gives you better social skills, it gives you empathy, reading is good, it's virtuous for you as a person that has all these nice effects. So I was trying in this research project to measure some of those effects. So we had about 700 youth apply to be in this reading program, of which we selected close to 300 to participate in the program and 260 to be a control group. And that selection was random, so it was a proper randomized control trial. Kids in the program then received a book or a bandit in a graphic novel every week for about 20 weeks over the course of the year. And we measured the impact through surveys, through experimental games, and I won't have time here to talk about them, I'll give you the link at the end to the reading. These experimental games measure trust, willingness to contribute to the public good, willingness to take risks, and willingness to be patient. And I just want to give you in graphical form some of the results. These graphs are a little complicated, but again I refer you to the paper. Basically on the x-axis there, we're measuring their reading frequency before the program started. So it's their reading frequency controlling for who they are. So controlling for their gender, controlling for their level of schooling that they had, controlling for their age, controlling for their ethnic group, how much reading did they have? So were they a much better reader given their age and gender than average? Then they'd have a high score on that initial measure of reading. And on the y-axis we have a similar residual measure for how much extra reading they did after the program had been underway for some time. And the two different kinds of dots there, the squares and the diamonds are for the participants in the program, the ones who were reading, and then the diamonds for the control group. And then the dashed line and the more solid line give you sort of the average effect of the program, and you can see that the dashed line is quite a bit above the solid line confirming that the reading program actually led to a lot more reading. At least as measured by the number of titles that people could list that they had read in the previous 30 days. So the program was effective in that sense that if you distribute titles to kids to read, they actually do read them. On the other hand, in terms of, you know, how much they affected people in terms of empathy or trust or willingness to contribute to public goods, there you can see the two lines overlap, there was no effect at all of the reading program on how much people were willing to contribute in these kind of real money trust games that we played with the participants and with the control group. Similar for taking risks, there was no difference at all between the two groups, and similar for patients measured by the discount rate. So we gave them basically choices about would you like to get the equivalent of $2 today or $5 in a month from now, there was no difference between the participants and the control group. So a little, for those of you who thought that there would be a lot of effects on people's personalities and choices and economic preferences from exposure to books, it turns out that at least in this one area, this one region of the world where we implemented this program, there weren't any big effects. There were zero effects, in fact. Let me talk very briefly and then I'll close about another project that we ran to give access to solar reading, to solar powered lanterns for promoting night reading. And I'll use the same method to measure that we have this program that we distributed these solar lanterns and encouraged some kids to read alone, some kids to reading groups and some kids to read with their families. And the effects here are how many books they've read in the previous 30 days. And the two lines, now you see there's a little bit of difference, especially for the good readers, for the poor readers who have their reading test scores below zero, there's really no effect at all of this solar reading, the solar lamp program. But for good readers who are doing well in the initial test of reading abilities, there's about an 8% increase in reading. So solar lanterns are probably not a very cost effective way to increase reading, but they will do some, have some effect on increasing reading. There was no effect, however, on the test scores themselves. So all that extra reading that they did with these solar lamps didn't actually enable them to perform better on a reading test. It's a small sample, this is a sample of several hundred kids, not that small. It would be nice to replicate this kind of research at a larger scale. So let me close very quickly by talking about this nascent social movement. We're not the only organization doing this. I've given you a list of some other organizations. If you type their names into Google, you'll easily find them. There's some larger organizations like Room to Read that primarily work with governments, especially working on school libraries. And then there's other organizations that are primarily book provision organizations that ship books over to libraries in Africa. We've seen a lot of activity over the last 10 years since I've been involved promoting reading. And I think it's really exciting time for people who are interested in promoting libraries and books, and especially in rural Africa. Let me talk a little bit about the challenges. And I'll save the rest for talking in the question and answer period. The main challenges that we have are with three actors, local communities, national library authorities, and outside NGOs. And there are different challenges with each of those. So we partner with local institutions to establish our libraries, which are community libraries. But we need a community partner if we're going to have a community library. And that's tough in a place like Burkina Faso, because Burkina Faso only decentralized political administration in 2006. So before that, there was only a central national representative who administered a larger region. And villages had no local political structures. Since 2006, rural communes have been established and mayors elected. But a lot of the mayors are not literate. A lot of the counselors in the rural communes are not literate. The mayors do not get paid, actually, don't receive salaries. So they're working basically entirely as volunteers for their communities. And so their time to devote to supervising, managing, and partnering for village libraries is really challenging. And just as a kicker for some of the challenges of partnering with local institutions in October, there was a national uprising in Burkina Faso that ousted the dictator of 27 years. The transition government suspended all local government. And did not, has been very slow in replacing local government. So we currently don't actually have any clearly defined partners in the villages where we support our libraries. That's just the tip of the iceberg of what kind of challenges we face in local communities. Those challenges are even more difficult at the national level. Some countries like Kenya have very active, very well-funded national library services. And Burkina Faso, on the other hand, public libraries are supported by a division called the Sennelok. It's a division of the Ministry of Culture. Basically consists of an office with three or four staff members who have no budget to actually do any programs. So their budget is basically just their salaries and nothing else. So they don't produce any reports. There's very little public accountability of whatever they do do during the year when they are receiving their salaries. Very frustrating to partner with them. We continue to reach out with them and hope that as personnel changes, especially in this transition period, we'll have more effective partnership. With outside NGOs like Eiffel, like Rotor International Catholic Relief Services, those are our really wonderful partners. They've been very supportive of our efforts over the years. The big challenge with those outside organizations, one of you thinking of launching small non-profits, is that they impose extremely onerous reporting and accounting requirements that take up a lot of management time. And sometimes their interests aren't fully aligned with the interests of the organization. So as you might imagine, being librarians or librarians in training, there's a huge push on for fads and what's new. A lot of push for new technologies in libraries and just new innovations in libraries. We're operating in rural villages where we still have to get books into libraries and we still have to have sort of basic, effective reading programs. So I want to close there and thank you very much for listening. And I'd enjoy hearing any questions that you might have and responding to them now. So I'll pause and see if anybody wants to write something in on chat or just enter. First of all, Michael, thank you. This was absolutely fantastic. More than I had any idea of what was going on over there. So it was great. I see a couple of people writing some stuff. I do have a question. I think the way you've gone about producing the local material is absolutely a wonderful way to get people interested in reading over there and again focusing on their own environment and what they see and are familiar with rather than trying to find either English language material shipped over from here or French language material shipped over from wherever. Are you aware of other organizations that are trying to do something similar or are you fairly unique in that regard? No, I wouldn't say we're unique. So as I mentioned, just in passing, we were actually inspired by Kathy Knowles, who's the director of an organization that's listed earlier called the OSU Children's Library Fund that is supporting large urban libraries in Ghana. It's a horror organization. I think now they've helped build and establish and fund five large urban libraries. And you have to go to their website, OSU Children's Library Fund, to look at these beautiful urban libraries that they're funding. And if you have any connections to Ghana, definitely contact them and try and spend some time volunteering in those community libraries. They're really wonderful. And so Kathy has been producing and publishing on a much larger scale than we published. She's been producing children's books, beautifully illustrated children's books and photo books for the last decade and a half. Another organization that we partner with is Maria's Library in Kenya. And they've been trying to pioneer establishing what we might call a smartphone books, right? So increasingly communities are using smartphones, so just like with iPads, we try and adapt our reading material to those kinds of smartphones and tablets. They've been trying to generate locally produced stories and adapt them to smartphones. So there's a big community trying to do this. We're not the only ones. Great. Thanks. Any other questions from any of our audience? Just grab, go ahead, please grab the mic. Hi, Dr. Kavein. Thank you for giving such a great presentation. I found this really, really informative. I too am also very, very interested and very serious about going abroad and bringing resources and educational materials abroad, especially to rural villages in Africa. And I'm not sure where to start, but I felt like this is such a great presentation. And I'll start by looking at some of the organizations that you listed. One of my questions is, are there any particular courses, classes, or subjects that you'd recommend to take in the MLIS program that would benefit if someone were interested in conducting projects and implementing programs like these abroad? That's a great question. And first, that would be so wonderful if you were able to make it work to go out and do some work with community libraries. It's extremely rewarding to do that. And so I want to, you know, encourage you and do feel free to get in touch with me. You have my website there and you can find my email on the website. I don't want to plug my own book too much, but the book that's up there on community libraries in rural Africa published, authored by myself, Valita Dent, a colleague who's the dean of the library at Long Island University, and Jeff Goodman, who's a psychologist who's become very interested in reading to small children and its effects on young, very young children. That book is a great place to start, plenty of reference materials. We have a whole chapter about sort of doing research and volunteering in community libraries in Africa. So I think you'll find that book very helpful and you can always ask your local library to order the book or get it through into library loan. I don't know, I think, you know, MLS, MLIS programs vary a lot. So I don't know what the course offerings are. And I think any course offering that's dealing with developing countries would probably be the most useful course you could take. I'll maybe turn it over to Bill if you have some better advice about what courses to take. We, yeah, we have on occasion had a seminar that has dealt with international librarianship and it's a question of finding someone who can teach that and getting into the schedule. And it's usually run, I think, under our 281 heading, Seminar in Contemporary Issues or 282, the Management Seminar Series. So you can look for that. But what Michael's not aware of and unfortunately for most of you if you're already in the program is that there's a new initiative at San Jose State to try to help internationalize the curriculum, which I just started. And so beginning, I think to some extent this semester, but more next semester we're supposed to try to have some sort of international aspect in almost every course. If nothing else to allow you to sort of customize to the extent that you can, assignments to take a look or bring in an international perspective as opposed to just focusing on libraries and issues in the United States or even in North America because we do have a number of students from Canada. So I think, I mean, to some extent the timing of Michael's presentation today and the one the the curriculum we had in January on the Lubuto Library Project will help us get us started in that direction and help the iSchool maintain more of an international focus. Because again, I think what they're doing over there is really good considering the numerous hurdles that they face and have to surmount from community and government support to, you know, the fact that the resources that they have over there are minimal and that they, in fact, have to create many of their own to bring reading to some of these young people over there. So any other questions or comments for Michael? Yes, sir. Go right ahead and take the mic. Thank you very much, Michael, for a fantastic overview of the work that Baffle's doing. I have two questions and may not have time for all of them, but my first one is more abstract and it goes to the notion of the young people that you're serving. In the U.S. and the West in particular, the notion of young people is driven almost entirely by this notion of youth development which has lots of ideological and historical complexity to it that libraries in particular, although other fields too, seem ill-equipped to deal with in a critical way. So this notion of youth development has everything to do about becoming a middle class, having particular skills to be effective in the marketplace. It's always based on notions of a future experience rather than focusing on one's experience as a young person in the moment. Among many other points of liability and concern. And I'm curious to know that since it informs such a comprehensive view about how libraries in particular construct and deliver their services, I'm curious to know if you've talked at all or if the experience that you've got in the work that you're doing imagines young people in a particular way. Other than this youth development model. Thank you. Well thanks Anthony for a great question and I think I know what you mean and I think we do have a particular vision and a lot of it emanates from me and from my own vision and that is that I really do try and impart this idea as a library as a place that first and foremost is serving leisure reading. And I think leisure reading is a really important way where youth in particular can explore their identities. And it's through reading novels and through reading, you know, good fiction and short stories and graphic novels that youth come to have a kind of a conversation with a bigger audience than just their friends and neighbors about, you know, who they are and what they want to do and just interpret them and make sense of the world around them. Youth in Africa and especially in rural Africa, you know, traditionally have not had much time to do that kind of identity exploration because they go right to work and they spend most of the day working. And that's changing now as rural Africa becomes wealthier and there's new opportunities and it's become part of increasingly it's become part of local understandings that youth is also this period of adolescence and youth need to not be working and that's fine and they need to be sort of exploring their own identity. So that's changing a lot and I think we try and, I particularly try to resist that there are very powerful forces that want to turn libraries into training centers. And I guess I feel like that's not the mission of the library to become a training center. That's somebody else's mission and that's great if they're training centers. I have nothing against training centers. But like you said, those are primarily sort of very practical, very job market oriented and that's not really the vision that inspires me for why we want to encourage youth in particular and adults to read. So I appreciate the question. I hope we're aligned. We'll get a chance to talk more about that. Thanks. Any other questions or comments from anyone before we wrap up for today? I guess not. So Michael, again, let me thank you for an outstanding presentation. Let me thank everyone for their being here and their participation. There was a question about the recording. So let me simply state that we will take Michael's slides and the audio version of this and we'll do a YouTube version that takes us a couple of weeks to get that put together. If you're part of the iSchool community, we will put out an announcement with a link for that to everyone. And if you're not, we'll also send that link to Michael and he'll have it up on the FAUVAL website as soon as that becomes available. So again, thank you for your participation everyone and have a great rest of the day. Back to Bill.