Meeting a Need: Where to Find Books in Arabic for K-5th Graders
If your city is anything like mine, you may have been asked by the residents to increase the number of books in your collection written in Arabic. Finding great reliable resources can be a bit tricky, however. To this end I’d like to thank Katie Anderson, the MLS, Youth Services Consultant of Library Support and Development Services at the Oregon State Library. Katie has whipped up a list of magnificent sources for you today, and she was kind enough to say that I could repost them here on my blog. For those of you with new refugees in town, or even just a growing population of Arabic speakers, please take note of the following:
- Beaverton City Library works with a “great vendor!” Jarir Saadoun at Jarir Bookstore, 714-539-8100.
- The person who selects world language materials for the Hennepin County Library works with, “two wonderful vendors for Arabic materials Sawa Books and Noorart. Both have lots of children’s materials, easy to use websites, and plenty of great folks on the other end to help. Sawa Books also can help making selections. I highly recommend both!” !
- Perma-bound does sell some Arabic titles, but they are mostly in paperback rather than actually in perma-bound format.
- International Children’s Digital Library – Read books in many different languages!
- Unite for Literacy – Books that can be heard in many languages
- Mantra Lingua (mantralingua.com) They are mostly elementary level books.
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About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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Thank you! One of the problems with Arabic language materials is cataloging. Does anyone have any ideas? My current strategy is to pull in a kid to translate for me so I can do minimal cataloging at least.
I would love to hear an answer to this too.
A regular vendor for World Languages from whom we purchase Arabic is Multi-Cultural Books & Videos (http://www.multiculturalbooksandvideos.com). They do offer copy and original cataloging.