Our Initiatives

• Bilingual Information Literacy Initiative
• Digital archive of works by and about Eugenio María de Hostos
• Documentary Heritage Program documentation and preservation project for the College Archives
• Escriba Literary Magazine
• Visions of Freedom for the Americas
• Information Commons
• Curricular Innovation and Collaboration with Faculty -- Library Faculty Innovation Awards
• Hidden Assets: Information Literacy Across the Curriculum
• History of Latin America II: a Dual-language, Online Class
• Grand Concourse One Hundred

The Library was awarded a $5,000 Diversity Grant from the CUNY Office of Diversity to translate the CUNY Information Competency Tutorial into Spanish. The primary objective with this project is to provide equal access to critical information technology tools to our Spanish dominant students. If our many Spanish-dominate ESL students can begin to learn these skills earlier in their own language, their ability to transfer the skills into English will be vastly improved. This online interactive tool is now available across CUNY and can be integrated into all disciplines.

In 2003 the Library was awarded a $25,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Extending the Reach grant to develop a seminal collection of works by and about Hostos and develop a digital archive of resources for research and teaching. The digital archive allows the College to disseminate information in Spanish and English on Hostos’s life and work to a broad public. With this project, the library fosters collaborative endeavors among faculty to develop and infuse our curriculum with courses that integrate Hostos’s thinking and writings in various disciplines, and promotes more culturally relevant curricular offerings for our students. As part of this project, the library organized and offered "Teaching Hostos at Hostos," a three-day interdisciplinary faculty retreat that enabled professors to develop curricular modules on integrating Hostos into the curriculum for a wide range of college courses.

With support from three Documentary Heritage Grants from the NY State Archives ($9,400; $24,500; and $18,900), this initiative strives to preserve the institutional memory of the college and provide an accessible collection of primary source material for curricular use. The goal of this project is to identify, survey and plan for the systematic collection of records that document the first decade of Hostos Community College and illustrate the decisive battles it survived—including funding struggles and ethnic conflicts—to become a vital and active contributor to the South Bronx and New York City. It involves the documentation of archival records relating to Hostos Community College; arrangement and description of documents already gathered, and the design of a survey instrument for the eventual collection of valuable Latino and black records from the larger South Bronx community.

Escriba Magazine is the Hostos Students' Literary and Art Journal. Escriba features essays, stories, poems, interviews, news articles and book excerpts as well as paintings, drawings, collage, photographs and sculpture by Hostos College students. In 2006, the Community College Humanities Association named Escriba in their Annual Literary Magazine Competition, as the best in the Eastern Region in the Small College category.

In the summer of 2005, faculty in the library department, in collaboration with faculty in the Humanities department, were awarded a $126,000 NEH Summer Seminar Grant to offer a humanities seminar. The seminar examined the role of New York City as a crucible in shaping Latin American and Caribbean political thought and history, as seen through the lives and writings of Puerto Rico’s renowned philosopher and educator, Eugenio María de Hostos (1839-1903) and Cuba’s martyred patriot, José Martí (1853-1895). Both men lived and worked as writers, journalists, and political activists in New York City, locus of a burgeoning community of Caribbean immigrants and political activists. They also spent considerable time exploring many facets of American life and values, while living in New York City—its educational system, industrial growth, labor movement, literary scene. The seminar, entitled "Visions of Freedom for the Americas: Eugenio María de Hostos and José Martí in 19th Century New York," focused on New York City’s little known and important role in Latino and Caribbean political activism in the late 19th century. The month-long seminar was co-taught by the Chief Librarian and a professor in the Humanities department. The rich resources for research of New York City’s finest institutions were used as an integral part of this program of study with walking tours, field trips, and research excursions to the best of the City of New York’s Library and research centers.

Working in conjunction with Student Government, the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Finance and Administration, the library is moving toward the Information Commons model for library services for implementation in the Fall 2007. In the summer of 2006 we re-designed installed a new reference desk, creating more room and greater access to students who need help. During the fall 2006 we began work with facilities and architectural planners to re-design the reference area to accommodate twice as many workstations, more group study areas for collaborative learning, comfortable seating, and two assistive technology workstations. Our goal is to create an environment that better supports student learning and addresses student research and technology needs at point of use. Our vision for the new information commons, anchored in our mission statement, is to create a place that enhances student learning and fosters integration, collaboration, and a sense of community while encouraging independent and critical thinking in an active learning environment. Our developing model and vision is fueled by an insightful chapter from Learning Spaces, edited by Diana G. Oblinger, entitled "Linking the Information Commons to Learning" by Joan K. Lippincott.

A major component of a Title V grant initiative, Shifting the Paradigm on Teaching and Learning to Improve Student Success, the Hostos Faculty Development Seminar program was conceived to challenge faculty to participate in a competitive, incentive-based initiative designed to generate faculty-driven innovations in curricular design and pedagogy. The goal is increased faculty engagement to improve student learning outcomes and opportunities through curricular change. The new series challenges faculty to compete for a spot in a seminar series designed to support their ideas for curriculum innovations to be implemented on campus. Faculty with the most innovative ideas are selected for Innovation Awards and are supported by college administration to implement their new course, program, plan or pedagogical approach to teaching and learning. Out of over 50 faculty participating, only seven projects were selected for awards and implementation. Three of the seven projects were from library faculty, each in collaboration with classroom faculty in other academic departments. A brief description of each project from the Library department is presented here.

"Information, Culture & Society: A Critical Introduction to the Information Age" is the working title of a flexible, credit-bearing interdisciplinary course that will provide students with general education competencies including information literacy and technology, critical thinking, computer literacy, reading, writing and oral communication. The course will be cross-listed with other departmental electives and thus will provide a foundation course for more options for Liberal Arts students in such areas as journalism, information studies, educational technology, public administration, communications and computer science. Information Literacy facilitates and supports the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and strengthens critical thinking and reading, evaluation, analysis and use of information to produce new knowledge. Although Library faculty have been teaching IL in open and course-integrated workshops, we believe the addition of innovative, interdisciplinary credit-bearing Information Studies (IS) courses, as offered at many of our sister CUNY institutions, will lead to a more thorough integration of critical General Education competencies into the curriculum and to increased student success. This project calls for the development of a foundation or a capstone IS course that can be cross-listed with other departmental electives, team taught, provide more Options for Liberal Arts students, and support the development of the cognitive abilities students need to pass the CUNY Proficiency Exam.

Hostos is a CUNY-wide leader in providing support for Spanish-speaking students as they make the transition from ESL to English content courses and as they prepare for CUNY-wide exams. In this project, the faculty seek to strengthen this role by developing a dual-language, online learning environment that supports Spanish-speaking students transitioning to English-only content courses. History of Latin America II Online will be an asynchronous (online only) class that will use online resources in English and Spanish to promote an understanding of the history of Latin America, and build critical thinking and information literacy skills. Open to both Spanish-speaking and English-dominant students, this course will offer students the choice of completing readings and assignments in either Spanish or English. The project will draw upon Hostos’s many rich institutional resources: a stellar Language and Cognition faculty, experts in teaching and assessing ESL students, excellent Instructional Technology support, and first-class online Library resources. This project is the result of the fruitful collaboration between a Humanities scholar and a Librarian, both of whom are committed to instilling a deep and informed appreciation of Latin American history and culture in Hostos students.

Grand Concourse One Hundred celebrates one of the great streets of New York City while presenting a more complete story of its impact on the Bronx and giving voice to the people who were not free to walk its sidewalks. Using the centenary of the Grand Concourse in 2009 as the catalyst, students in this new seminar will explore issues of class, race, identity, exclusion and urban planning to unearth and present a well-rounded story of a particular neighborhood or city planning issue like the new Yankee Stadium project. Students will better understand the great forces—market, political and otherwise—that come together to form great neighborhoods and urban areas. This collaboration between the college archivist and the chair of the Social and Behavioral Sciences department, this seminar will make use of primary source materials, field observations, class lectures and oral history interviews to explore how urban history, geography, economics, sociology and other social science disciplines help us understand cities and their neighborhoods. The 2009 birthday of the Concourse will be celebrated with a sharp academic insight and more complete images and stories of a beautiful street, its transitions, people and neighborhoods, all to be documented and preserved in the college archives.