The Moon Book Club gets foreign language books to Hawai’i’s libraries. Meanwhile, the Hawai’ian library system has 108 staff vacancies.
The library, beset by a critical staffing shortage and other needs, has an annual budget of only $35,000 for buying books in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese…. the principal difficulty in expanding the collection is cataloging, especially the Asian titles written in characters that must be romanized for the database. They also must be categorized correctly, and it’s sometimes hard to find resources to help librarians do that. [thanks brandon]