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Stone Child College Library gets grant to improve services, access

The Stone Child College Library received a $90,130 grant Tuesday from the Institute of Library and Museum Services through the work of the Chippewa Cree Tribe and RJS and Associates.

RJS CEO Jim Swan said that the grant is for two parts of the library, to increase public access to cultural archival materials and community records and increase community programming and cultural events to attract more people to the library.

“In this case, it’s actually not even so much the college as it is the community,” Swan said. “Stone Child Library serves two functions, one as the college library, the other as a community library.”

He added that his firm wrote the proposal, working with Stone Child College and the College Librarian Joy Bridwell back in February, submitting the application in April.

A press release said the one-year grant aims to improve quality and access to the library and to information and educational services for the community. 

“The funds will be used to host community events, purchase archiving equipment, work with a digital preservation consultant to build archives, provide a library assistant and enable the librarian to attend vital professional development trainings,” it said.

Bridwell said that part of the grant will be used to fund a variety of different programs, such as the library’s monthly community event, which is held the last Wednesday of every month. The events are focused on language and culture, such as a Cree language coloring night, and the library tries to make it fun and appealing to the community by having different speakers or authors at the event.

She added that the library is also looking at digitizing archives at the library.

“We have a lot of materials that would be easier to access if we could just digitize it,” she said.

This hasn’t been done in a long time and digitizing the information will make is easier for students and community members to access materials and information, she said. The library will be bringing elders from within the community to help with sorting through the materials and translate some of the Cree language into English so the information is properly stored and protected.

Something she wants to do is Faces of the Library, a program to get people to tell their stories and photos stored in the library archives, a snapshot of people’s lives on the reservation at the current time.

“We want everyone to be able to tell their story, because everyone has a story to tell,” she said.

Bridwell said the program will include interviews from elders, youths and children. She added that she wants this to be seen as something to motivate people, something people can look back on and appreciate.

She added that she is excited about the grant because she has so many different ideas about what she can do in one year. Stone Child Library is not a public library, and is unable to get the same funding that public libraries can.

Some of the community events include Kinship Charts and Family Trees Day, Wednesday, Sept. 25, she said. For the event, the library will have elders come and talk about the family structure, teach the traditional words for different family members, and the library will be offering access to archives and genealogy research, such as Heritage Quest and Ancistory.com, so people can research their families.

 

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