projects

Paseo Boricua Community Library Project

Projects

The Paseo Boricua Community Library Project relates to many different initiatives. Come on in and see what we're up to.

Cecilia Vicuna, Chilean artist and poet, invites children around the world to participate in Semiya/Seedyou project.

Our latest work includes:

Beginning on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2003, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center will offer its first set of Street Academy courses, including classes on community libiarianship and information technology.
We're cataloging the Joan Nicklin Third World Collection and creating a web-based library catalog (see the draft for a database design) Puerto Rican Cultural Center.
Professor Sarai Lastra (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Puerto Rico) is researching challenges system designers may face when building a community information system for a Latino community. Particularly she examines: How can social network analysis, Latino studies and computer supported cooperative work help in understanding the community's information needs? How can the design of an interface enhance access to its networked resources? What are the challenges faced when designing a tool whose goal is to harvest community knowledge from a diasporic community? Read her paper "Harvesting Community Knowledge" here.
Professor Nilda Flores-Gonzalez (Dept. of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago) is conducting research on events in Humboldt Park related to the Puerto Rican community, with a focus on Roberto Clemente High School. Her primary data source is a collection of thousands of local newspaper articles. With the assistance of several students, she is indexing and organizing the articles so that they will be accessible to researchers and residents alike. One facet of the project involves creating a web interface to the newspaper article collection. See the early prototype here.
Through the Center on Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems (CAMPWS), the National Science Foundation is supporting community water quality projects in Paseo Boricua.
Students in the Pedro Albizu-Campos High School learned about Internet use in Latino homes and how to evaluate Internet resources in their Spring 2003 information technology course, taught by Alejantro Molina.
Students in a Univerisity of Illinois, Chicago course taught by Professor Jose Lopez conducted research about important Paseo Boricua neighborhood organizations.
A group of students and neighborhood activists made plans for incorporating a focus on the need and contributions of disabled residents in the PBCL, including employment and family resources.